
Class 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



WHAT MEN LIVE BY 



WORK 



PLAY 




LOVE 



WORSHIP 



BY 



RICHARD C. CABOT, M.D. 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



/ 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 







COPYRIGHT, I914, BY RICHARD C. CABOT 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published January 1Q14 



FEB 






; 8 9 7 



TO MY WIFE 

INCOMPARABLE LEADER AND COMRADE 

IN THE WORK, PLAY, LOVE, AND WORSHIP 

OF MANY YEARS 



PREFACE 

This book has been written in many Pullmans and in 
the homes of many friends. I fear it bears evidence 
of the Pullmans; I am proudly certain that it shows 
traces of all the friends, — of Dr. and Mrs. Philip 
King Brown, of San Francisco; Bruce Porter, of the 
same incomparable city; Maulsby Kimball, of Buffalo; 
Professor W. E. Hocking, of New Haven; Florence 
Painter, Rosalind Huidekoper Greene, and Henry 
Copley Greene, of Boston. The last five have read the 
entire manuscript, corrected many errors, and put L: 
many improvements; to all I am deeply grateful. 

I owe still more to my wife, whose influence appears, 
I hope, on every page. Other friends, visible and in- 
visible, have also helped, — G. K. Chesterton, Josiah 
Royce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and so many others 
that no title-page would hold their beloved names. I 
must be content with thanking them for whatever is 
true and absolving them from whatever is false in the 
pages to follow. 

My title is that of one of Tolstoy's most beautiful 
stories. Such use of his words is quite in accord with 
the spirit and letter of his beliefs and with the gratitude 
which I owe him. 

Parts of several chapters have already been printed 
in the Atlantic Monthly and are here reprinted by cour- 
tesy of the editor. 



INTRODUCTION 

In the spring of 1909, I had been gnawing away at 
three tough and ancient problems which came to me 
through the Social Service Department of the Massa 
chusetts General Hospital: What is the best way to 
care for the tuberculous? How can " nervous people' 
(neurasthenics) be restored to balance and happiness i 
Where can we find help that is worth offering to a girl 
facing motherhood without a husband? 

A vacation in England that summer took me far 
enough away from the surface details of these prob- 
lems to see that the solutions thus far suggested for 
them all have a strong family likeness and illustrate 
three stages of opinion. 

An institution is our first idea for all these sufferers. 
A sanitarium for the tuberculous, a nervine for the 
neurasthenics, a "Rescue Home" for the unmarried 
mother. This solution contents us for a time, but 
: further experience shows us how limited is the good 
which an institution can do. Even at its best it is too 
artificial, too much of a hothouse existence, to accom- 
plish more than the beginning of a cure. The violent 
I herding of special miseries in one place — disease 
j facing similar disease, day in and day out — makes 
; physical or moral contagion always a danger, sometimes 
/ a fact. More individual attention is needed for each 



xii INTRODUCTION 

body and soul. Mass treatment will accomplish only 
the first stages of cure. 

Personal care, then, personal teaching, personal 
influence, seem to be the need. We form a small group 
of consumptives into a " class.' ' The doctor and the 
nurse not only teach the patients hygiene, but use 
their Christian names and try to become friendly with 
each. The nurse visits the tenement and tries to show 
the poor consumptive how to carry out at home the 
sanitary regime of the hospital. Personal influence is 
appealed to for the momentum needed to encourage the 
.sufferer along the barren, ugly path toward recovery. 

So with sexual troubles. The reaction against insti- 
tutionalism brings us to rely on personal influence and 
personal teaching. Some one must win the affection 
f each sufferer, penetrate the intricacies of the past, 
: nd guide the future better. Not alms or institutions, 
I ait a friend is what we hope to provide. Not material 
i id or mere instruction, but one's self, one's best serv- 
ice, seems now the ideal gift. 

But though this is certainly part of the answer, we 
:annot rest content with it, for any one who tries to 
give "himself " in this way soon finds out that the gift 
/s pitifully small and weak. We soon use up our slender 
stock of wisdom. The appeal, " Do this for my sake," 
soon wears out. No human personality is rich enough 
to suffice for another's food. Moreover, in proportion \ 
as this plan succeeds, we perceive the dangers of de- j 
pendence. The sufferer must learn to stand upon his \ 



INTR; DUCTION xiii 

own feet. He must gel back into life. "Real Life," 
then, as we now begin to see, is after all the best teacher 
and the best doctor. Nothing less fruitful will nourish 
body and soul. We do not give up friendship and per- 
sonal influence; btrt we see that they must take their 
part with the other sanative elements of normal ex- 
perience. 

For the neurasthenic and for those struggling with 
problems of sex, this need of "real life" is now pretty 
generally recognized. Seclusion in sanitaria or rescue 
homes is being replaced by efforts to get the sufferers 
back into the industrial world, back into family life, 
back to the surroundings which keep ordinary people 
a-going. It is not so obvious that the tuberculous need 
anything of the kind as a means of cure. Yet, if not, 
why do consumptive doctors at a sanitarium like 
Trudeau get along better than other consumptive 
patients? Because (so Dr. Trudeau once told me) the 
doctors are living a more normal life, — they can 
sometimes do a little doctoring or microscopy, and so 
forget that they are patients. The successful progress 
of their work in sick-room or laboratory gives them 
courage to be faithful to rules and to force down food. 

In three widely separate fields, then, I think I see 
a similar evolution, away from institutionalism, away 
from dependence upon personal influence, — toward 
a plan, the essence of which is to get the sufferer back 
to real life: not back to "nature," but back to the best 
that civilization has to offer to normal people. 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

Educators, social workers, a ad physicians with whom 
I have talked, seem to agree upon the following mysti- 
cal prescription : — ■■* 



# 






REAL LIFE an indefinite 




amount 




Take a full dose after meals and 




at bedtime. 



But what do we mean by " real life" i What are the 
essentials which we want to secure for consumptives, 
neurasthenics, and "wayward" youth of both sexes? 

Watching like a Boswell the practice of experts in 
the healing of broken souls and wounded characters, 
I have noticed that besides work — my own favorite 
prescription — the experts apply two other remedies : 
recreation (through play, art, or natural beauty) and 
affection. They also hope rather helplessly that a fourth 
resource, worship, will somehow get into the sufferer's 
life. 

Out of the dazzle and welter of modern civilization, 
which offers a hundred quack remedies for every ill 
of the soul, work, play, and love emerge as the per- 
manent sources of helpfulness to which parents, edu- 
cators, and social workers are now turning with con- 
fidence, while over their shoulders they glance wistfully 
toward worship. 



INTRODUCTION xv 

"Real Life," then, if it is to mean the nourishing, 
sustaining, and developing of existence, demands work, 
play, and love, and so>much of the material and^pirit- 
ual conditions of existence as make these possible. 

Though I came to this belief first from a doctor's 
point of view, and as the result of search for the essen- 
tial principles of healing within a special field, I have 
since come to notice that the special groups of people 
whom I see as patients are not the only ones who need 
these great medicines. / 1 notice a growing tendency 
to center all remedial effort upon the same trio of ends, 
no matter what sort of trouble is at hand. More satis- 
fying and interesting occupation, more refreshment 
through art and play, deeper and more intense affection, 
are the life-preservers which one wants to secure about 
the blind, the maimed, the invalid, the discharged 
prisoner, the boy who lies and steals but is not yet a 
prisoner, the orphan, the deserted wife, the discour- 
aged, down-at-the-heel family, the neglected or abused 
child, the alcoholic, the convalescent, the insane, the 
feeble-minded, the morphinist, the boy who has in- 
herited millions, and the society girl who has got 
through "coming out." In genuine emergencies and 
for those overdriven in their industrial harness, material 
relief (food, rest, air, sleep, warmth) may be the first 
necessity, but unless we can give the vital nourishment 
which I am now advising, all material relief soon be- 
comes a farce or a poison, just as medicine is in most 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

chronic diseases a farce or a poison. Vitality and re- 
sisting power are what we most need, and these must 
be created for the sick out of the same nourishment 
which keeps the well people well. 

I made just now a long list of sufferers. Did I men- 
tion all who need the essentials of real life? Obviously 
not, for those who are going right need these life-saving 
activities as much as those who are going wrong. It is 
the stake in life given us by our work, our play, and our 
love that keeps any one from going wrong. The con- 
servative needs them to leaven his conservatism ; the 
radical needs them to hold him down to solid ground. 
Young and old need them, for by these three principles 
we are helped to grow up and saved from growing old. 

In this style I was sailing confidently along when 
one day a friend asked me: "How do you distinguish 
Work, Play, and Love from Drudgery, Frivolity, and 
Lust? You have made saints of your favorites and put 
halos around their heads, but not every one can see 
the halos or can believe in them upon your say-so." 

"True!" I should answer, "not on my say-so, but 
on your own. You believe in them now." Everybody 
sees halos and worships saints of some kind, though 
many have learned to hide the habit even from them- 
selves. Work, play, and love are my saints, and in this 
book I want to draw their lineaments and make their 
halos visible to others. The religion of work, or art, 
and of love is not the strongest or the truest, but it is 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

a good beginning. There one finds outlet for devotion 
and gropes toward God. One can do all but speak to 
God. One fails only when it comes to worship, which 
is to-day so unfashionable a habit that one must be 
prepared to shock the modern ear and to violate all the 
scientific proprieties if one confesses belief in it. Civili- 
zation is supposed to have carried us beyond the need 
of rites and forms and to have fused the demonstra- 
tive and emotional side of religion into daily work, 
play, and affection. 

But this is theory, not observation. As a matter 
of fact the doctor, social worker, or teacher who be- 
lieves that all true religion can be woven into work, 
play, or affection falls into the same fallacy as those who 
think English composition can be taught by weaving 
it into the courses in history, science, and philosophy. 
Experience shows, I think, that vital religion and the 
ability to write good English are not acquired in this 
incidental way. Scientists, economists, and historians 
often write barbarously. We must practice the art of 
writing directly as well as incidentally, else we shall 
duplicate the catastrophe of our public-school system, 
wherein the conscientious effort to avoid proselyting, 
to abolish sectarian teaching, and let religion take care 
of itself, has now brought us perilously near the French 
secularism. 

There is no originality in my suggestion that we 
should focus our efforts upon work, play, love, and 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

worship. For though we talk a great deal about "effi- 
ciency," economics, hygiene, and other matters of 
secondary importance, at bottom we all know well 
enough what we need, and what all the paraphernalia 
of civilization, money, health, and education, are 
really meant for. If I were not persuaded that, in our 
right minds, we know the fundamental reasons for all 
this hurry and bustle, I should not venture to write a 
reminder. We know where we are traveling, but we 
need a time-table to remind us of details. 

I do not say that every one wants only the ends which 
I have named. He usually wants fame, riches, wisdom, 
talents, personal beauty, and an easy time of it gener- 
ally. He may be too sleepy and comfortable, or too 
tired and miserable, to want anything but Nirvana or 
release. Yet, enervated by heat, calloused by routine, 
steeped in sin, crazed with pain, stupefied by luxury 
or by grief, still he needs four inexorable blessings. 

The interplay of these four is the end of life, and the 
sole worthy end, in my creed. This is the fruit of 
the "life and liberty " which are guaranteed under our 
Constitution. This is the goal to be secured through 
efficient and progressive governmental machinery. 
This is the end of all education and all moral training. 
This is the food of the soul in health or in disease, needed 
by the doctor, the social worker, the teacher, and the 
statesman, to feed their own souls as well as to prevent 
and to cure social ills. This is our justification for the 
enormous machinery and the costly ugliness of civili- 



INTRODUCTION xix 

zation. This is the essential of that "more abundant 
life" which many modern prophets * extol without 
defining. 

Every human being, man, woman, and child, hero 
and convict, neurasthenic and deep-sea fisherman, 
needs the blessing of God through these four gifts. 
With these any life is happy despite sorrow and pain, 
successful despite bitter failure. Without them we 
lapse into animalism or below it. If you want to keep 
a headstrong, fatuous youth from overreaching 
himself and falling, these must be the elements of 
strength. When you try to put courage and aspiration 
into the gelatinous character of the alcoholic or the 
street- walker, you will fail unless you can give respon- 
sibility, recreation, affection, and through them a 
glimpse of God. 

I do not believe that evolution, revolution, or de- 
cadence have power to change these elemental needs. 
For all I know, we may be this instant in the position 
of the French court before the Revolution. At this 
very moment we may be lurching over the smooth 
bend of a cataract that is to overwhelm us ; but if so, 
it is because we have not enough of that unchanging 
valor which has preserved us so far, and will reconsti- 
tute us after our downfall. For work, play, love, and 
prayer are open to rich and poor, to young and old ; 
they are of all times and all races in whom character 
is an ideal. 

1 For example, Ellen Key. 



xx INTRODUCTION 

On each of these gigantic forces I have particular 
designs: I want to show the sacredness of work and 
love; I want to show the accessibility and the univer- 
sality of play and worship. That despite our secular 
habits, we are so close to worship that we may at 
any time abruptly fall into it ; that play and art can 
be closely woven into the fabric of work, till drudgery 
is reduced to a minimum; that work is our key to 
the sacredness of material nature, and that affection 
can be disciplined only by consecration. These are my 
theses. 

This book has still another motive: gratitude for 
the good things that have ; come to me through work, 
play, love, and worship. Is it not churlish to make no 
attempt at hearty applause for all that is given us in 
this world? Grant that I am shielded from much that 
makes others curse God or nature; shall I not praise 
my side of the shield? 

"On the 19th of July, 1857," says Tolstoy, "in 
Lucerne before the Schweitzerhof Hotel, where many 
rich people were lodging, a wandering minstrel sang for 
half an hour his songs and played his guitar. About 
a hundred people listened to him. The little man in 
the darkness poured out his heart like a nightingale in 
couplet after couplet, song after song. Near by on the 
boulevard were heard frequent murmurs of applause, 
though generally the most respectful silence reigned. 
The minstrel thrice asked them all to give him something. 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

Not one person gave him anything, and many made fun 
of him." (The italics are Tolstoy's.) 

There is no sin that I would not rather have upon my 
soul than to have displayed to the universe such in- 
gratitude. 

Do you say that the universe cares as little about 
our praise as the ocean for Byron's command to "roll 
on"? Well, I vote against you. I believe the universe 
does care, and needs our gratitude. 



WHAT MEN LIVE BY 
PART I: WORK 



WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

1 CHAPTER I 

WORK, PLAY, AND DRUDGERY 

A camper starting into the woods on his annual 
vacation undertakes with enthusiasm the familiar task 
of carrying a Saranac boat upon a shoulder-yoke. 
The pressure of the yoke on his shoulders feels as good 
as the grasp of an old friend's hand. The tautening of 
his muscles to the strain of carrying seems to gird up his 
loins and true up his whole frame. With the spring of 
the ground beneath him and the elastic rebound of the 
boat on its resilient yoke, he seems to dance over the 
ground between two enlivening rhythms. It is pure fun. 

In the course of half a mile or so, the carry begins to 
feel like work. The pleasant, snug fit of the yoke has 
become a very respectable burden, cheerfully borne, 
for the sake of the object in view, but not pleasant. 
The satisfaction of the carry is now something antici- 
pated, no longer grasped in the present. The job is 
well worth while, but it is no joke. It will feel good to 
reach the end and set the boat down. 

Finally, if in about ten minutes more there is still 
no sight of the end, no blue, sparkling glimmer of dis- 
tant water low down among the trees, the work be- 
comes drudgery. Will it ever end? Are we on the right 



4 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

trail at all? Is it worth while to go on? Perhaps not; 
but to stop means painfully lowering the boat to the 
ground and later heaving it up again, which is the 
worst task of all — worse than going on as we are. 
So we hang to it, but now in scowling, stumbling, 
swearing misery, that edges ever nearer to revolt. 

In varying proportions every one's life mingles the 
experiences of that carry. At its best and for a few, 
work becomes play, at least for blessed, jewel-like mo- 
ments. By the larger number it is seen not as a joy 
but a tolerable burden, borne for the sake of the chil- 
dren's education, the butter on the daily bread, the 
hope of promotion. Finally, for the submerged fraction 
of humanity who are forced to labor without choice 
and almost from childhood, life seems drudgery, borne 
simply because they cannot stop without still greater 
misery. They are committed to it, as to a prison, and 
they cannot get out. 

It is not often, I believe, that a whole life is possessed 
by any one of these elements, — play, work, or drudg- 
ery. Work usually makes up the larger part of life, with 
play and drudgery sprinkled in. Some of us at most 
seasons, all of us at some seasons, find work a galling 
yoke to which we have to submit blindly or angrily for 
a time, but with revolt in our hearts. Yet I have rarely 
seen drudgery so overwhelming as to crush out alto- 
gether the play of humor and good-fellowship during 
the day's toil as well as after it. 



WORK, PLAY, AND DRUDGERY 5 

In play you have what you want. In work you know 
what you want and believe that you are serving or ap- 
proaching it. In drudgery no desired object is in sight; 
blind forces push you on. 

Present good, future good, no good, — these possi- 
bilities are mingled in the crude ore which we ordinarily 
call work. Out of that we must smelt, if we can, the 
pure metal of a vocation fit for the spirit of man. The 
crude mass of "work," as it exists to-day in mines, 
ships, stores, railroads, schoolrooms, and kitchens, con- 
tains elements that should be abolished, elements that 
are hard, but no harder than we need to call out the 
best of us, and here and there a nugget of pure delight. 

I want to separate, in this book, the valuable in- 
gredients from the conglomerate loosely called work, 
especially those ingredients which preserve a " moral 
equivalent" 1 for the virtues bred in war, in hunting, 
and in the savage's struggle against nature. For in 
battle, in the chase, and in all direct dealing with ele- 
mentary forces, we have built up precious powers of 
body and of mind. These we are in danger of losing 
in our more tame and orderly civilization, as William 
James has so convincingly shown. 

His warning is echoed in different keys by President 
Briggs, 2 and by others, who fear that kindergarten 

1 William James, " The Moral Equivalent for War," Memories and 
Studies. Longmans, Green & Co., 1911. 

2 LeBaron R. Briggs, School, College, and Character. Houghton 
Mifflin Company, 1901. 



6 WHAT MEN LIVE BY , 

methods in education are making children soft and 
spiritless, and that all sting and stubbornness has been 
extracted from modern school work. President Briggs 
quotes, apparently with approval, the opinion of James 
Martineau that " power to drudge at distasteful tasks 
is the test of faculty, the price of knowledge, and the 
matter of duty." 

This conception blurs, I think, the most vital distinc- 
tion in the whole matter, that, namely, between work 
and drudgery on the one side and that between 
work and play on the other. Work, like morality and 
self-government, differs from play because play is 
spontaneous and delightful, while work is done soberly 
and against resistance. Nevertheless we work because 
we want the fruit of work — not from pure dogged 
determination. To force ourselves along without any 
desire for a goal of attainment is drudgery. Work 
is doing what you don't now enjoy for the sake of a 
future which you clearly see and desire. Drudgery is 
doing under strain what you don't now enjoy and 
for no end that you can now appreciate. 

To learn how to work is so to train our imagination 
that we can feel the stimulus from distant futures, as 
the coast cities of California get heat, light, and power 
from distant mountain streams. In all work and all 
education the worker should be in touch with the dis- 
tant sources of interest, else he is being trained to 
slavery, not to self-government and self-respect. 



WORK, PLAY, AND DRUDGERY 7 

Defined in this way, work is always, I suppose, an 
acquired taste. For its rewards are not immediate, but 
come in foretastes and aftertastes. It involves post- 
ponement and waiting. In the acquisition of wealth, 
economists rightly distinguish labor and waiting, but in 
another sense labor is always waiting. You work for 
your picture or your log house because you want it, 
and because it cannot be had just for the asking. It 
awaits you in a future visible only to imagination. Into 
the further realization of that future you can penetrate 
only by work: meantime you must wait for your re- 
ward. 

Further, this future is never perfectly certain. There 
is many a slip between the cup and the lip; and even 
when gross accidents are avoided, your goal — your 
promotion, your home, the degree for which you have 
worked — usually does not turn out to be as you have 
pictured it. This variation you learn to expect, to 
discount, perhaps to enjoy, beforehand, if you are a 
trained worker, just because you have been trained in 
faith. For work is always justified by faith. Faith, 
holding the substance (not the details) of things un- 
seen, keeps us at our tasks. We have faith that our 
efforts will some day reach their goal, and that this 
goal will be something like what we expected. But no 
literalism will serve us here. If we are willing to accept 
nothing but the very pattern of our first desires, we are 
forever disappointed in work and soon grow slack in it. 
In the more fortunate of us, the love of work includes 



8 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

a love of the unexpected, and finds a pleasant spice of 
adventure in the difference between what we work for 
and what we actually get. 

Yet this working faith is not pure speculation. It in- 
cludes a foretaste of the satisfaction to come. We plunge 
into it as we jump into a cold bath, not because the 
present sensations are altogether sweet, but because 
they are mingled with a dawning awareness of the glow 
to follow. We do our work happily because the future 
is alive in the present — not like a ghost but like a 
leader. 

Where do we get this capacity to incarnate the future 
and to feel it swelling within us as a present inspiration? 
The power to go in pursuit of the future with seven- 
leagued boots or magic carpets can hardly be acquired, 
or even longed for, until we have had some actual 
experience of its rewards. We seem then to be caught 
in one of those circles which may turn out to be either 
vicious or virtuous. In the beginning, something or 
somebody must magically entice us into doing a bit of 
work. Having done that bit, we can see the treasure 
of its results; these results will in turn spur us to re- 
doubled efforts, and so once more to increased rewards. 
Given the initial miracle and we are soon established 
in the habit and in the enjoyment of work. 

But there is a self-maintaining circularity in dis- 
ease, idleness, and sloth, as well as in work, virtue, and 
health. Until we get the result of our work, we cannot 



WORK, PLAY, AND DRUDGERY 9 

feel the motive for exertion. Until we make the exer- 
tion (despite present pain and a barren outlook), we 
cannot taste the delightful result, nor feel the spur to 
further effort. The wheel is at the dead point ! Why 
should it ever move? 

Probably some of us are moved at first by the leap 
of an elemental instinct in our muscles, which act be- 
fore and beyond our conscious reason. Other people 
are tempted into labor by the irrational contagion of 
example. We want to be "in it" with the rest of our 
gang, or to win some one's approval. So we get past 
the dead point, — often a most alarming point to pa- 
rents and teachers, — and once in motion, keep at it by 
the circular process just described. 

Various auxiliary motives reinforce the ordinary 
energies of work. Here I will allude only to one — a 
queer pleasure in the mere stretch and strain of our 
muscles. If we are physically fresh and not worried, 
there is a grim exhilaration, a sort of frowning delight, 
in taking up a heavy load and feeling that our strength 
is adequate to it. It seems paradoxical to enjoy a dis- 
comfort, but the paradox is now getting familiar. For 
modern psychologists have satisfactorily bridged the 
chasm between pleasure and pain, so that we can now 
conceive, what athletes and German poets have long 
felt, the delight in a complex of agreeable and disagree- 
able elements. In work we do not often get as far as 
the "selige Schmerzen" so familiar in German lyrics, 
but we welcome difficulties, risks, and physical strains 



10 



WHAT MEN LIVE BY 



because (if we can easily conquer them) they add a 
spice to life, — a spice of play in the midst of labor. 
Work gets itself started, then, by the contagion of 
some one else's example, or by an explosion of animal 
energies within us. After a few turns of the work-rest 
cycle we begin to get a foretaste of rewards. A flavor 
of enjoyment appears in the midst of strain. Habit 
then takes hold and carries us along until the taste for 
work is definitely acquired. 



CHAPTER II 

THE: CALL OF THE JOB AS A DOCTOR HEARS IT 

Most doctors have set a good many women to work 
and taken a good many men out of it. Doctors 
have, therefore, a doubly fortunate opportunity to see 
what work can do for people, and a better right than 
any one else to speak (if, alas, they cannot sing!) of 
its blessings. 

We all of us see something of the man out of work, 
thanks to strikes, freaks of fashions, and shifts in trade 
currents. But in these crises it is the pressing need of 
the work's wage that holds our attention — not the 
desire for work itself. Because the doctor's angle of 
vision is different, he sees another type of suffering. He 
sees men to whom the pinch of hunger is unknown 
languish, chafe, and fret when forcibly removed from 
their daily work. I recall the illness of an old stage- 
driver. He had no need to work. His children were 
eager and willing to supply his wants. But despite 
good medical care he would not or could not conva- 
lesce till his sons lifted him into his wagon-seat and put 
"the lines" into his feeble hands. Then you could see 
him gain every day. 

In an old man, shaped and warped by his work 
through seventy years, this tug of habit is perhaps only 
natural. But such habits of work are often early formed . 



12 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

The schoolboy usually wants to get back to school as 
fast as he can after an illness, and if he finds some- 
thing besides pure work to attract him in school, he is 
like his elders in this also. For work is seldom ''pure," 
— rarely separated or shut away from the other ele- 
ments of sociability, exciting variety and fun. 

I want to set down what I can of the good which 
I have seen accomplished by work for two classes 
of people : — for men temporarily deprived of it, and 
for women who are experiencing its rewards for the 
first time. 

Many times I have seen work pull people out of the 
misery of a self-centered existence. Without work many 
a woman has thought herself fundamentally selfish, or 
if she was not so rough with herself, her relations have 
vented a similar lament. For almost all people think 
about themselves when they are not enticed by the 
call of the world's work into thinking of something 
else. To get busy is the way out of most cases of self- 
centeredness. We are like wells. When our life is full, 
the dregs of shallow selfishness at the bottom do not 
often rise to consciousness. But when we are empty, 
our selfishness is necessarily exposed, and we are to 
blame only if we have made no effort to fill up the 
aching void with what we know belongs there, — 
especially work. 

The nervous sufferer or the chronic invalid is often 
no more to blame for his selfishness than for the piti- 



THE CALL OF THE JOB 13 

ful meagerness of his muscles. The long and the short 
of it is, he is not nourished; his vitality has been 
emptied out. Till he gets back into life he cannot help 
staring at the four blank walls of his narrow self. But 
to get back into life, or to get into it for the first time 
(as many women have to) is practically what work 
means. For the world is primarily a working world. 
From the insects to the angels, creation hums with 
work, and through work fits us for play. 

Idleness is corrosive. Human energies, like human 
stomachs, turn inward perversely and self -destructively 
if they have not material to work on. Deprived of work, 
people exhaust themselves like crazed animals beating 
against their bars, even when the cage is of their own 
making. Thoughts, that should run out in path-finding, 
path-making labor, circle round and round within the 
mind, till it is dizzy and all distinctions are blurred. By 
work you straighten out such cramped and twisted 
energies, as you shake out a reefed sail. 

Healthy people deprived of the outlet and stimulus 
of work are in danger of getting into one or another 
sexual muddle. For we are many of us creatures who 
can be purified only by motion, as the running stream 
drops out its pollutions when its current grows swift, 
but gets defiled as soon as it stagnates in shallows. 
Consciousness, if not kept fully occupied with its proper 
business, is pretty sure to upset the whole human ma- 
chine by turning its light on what ought to be in dark 



i 4 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

unconsciousness. A person is normally unconscious of 
his eyes, of his heart's action, of his stomach, his in- 
testines, and all the rest of his separate and serviceable 
organs^ But the moment consciousness gets focused 
on any one bit of the human body, we get disaster like 
to that of the dancer who becomes conscious of his feet. 
He becomes, as we mistakenly say, " self-conscious.' ' 
We mean that he is narrowly and painfully conscious 
of a very small piece of himself, and forgetful of a 
very much larger area. A workingman's "self " is the 
whole milieu, the whole "proposition" in which he is 
normally engaged. Because he is the engineer of his 
train, the policeman of his beat, his "self" is enriched 
and employed by the extent, the variety, the dignity 
and worth of his job. The awareness of his separate 
organs and functions, a torture to him in idleness, van- 
ishes as soon as he gets actively busy. 

But sedentary and emotional occupations are im- 
possible for some people because of the sexual tension 
which they tend to produce. One of the justifications 
of the apparently wasteful and unintelligent "hus- 
tling" in our modern world is here. What Tolstoy 
seeks to accomplish on his country estate by exhaust- 
ing labor out of doors, the city man brings to pass by 
rushing and hurrying about like a June-bug. He 
works off superabundant energy in irrational ways, 
because he is not bright enough to work it off other- 
wise. But it is surely a good thing to work it off 
somehow. 



THE CALL OF THE JOB 15 

<t- Work dispels discouragement because it turns con- 
sciousness away from our disheartening littleness and 
lights up the big world — our world — of possible 
achievement. Consciousness cannot voluntarily ex- 
tinguish itself. Its light must beat upon the inner walls 
of our narrow self and illumine them with an unnatural 
glare unless we have windows into the world's great in- 
terests. Through these consciousness can escape. With- 
out them it is turned upon itself. There is no fault 
in that. The self-centeredness of the invalid, of the 
man out of work, or of the rich female loafer is a nec- 
essary consequence of the fact that consciousness, like a 
lighted lamp, must illumine something. It will hit with 
false intensity on the nearest thing if outlets are cut off. 
Now that "nearest thing" in the case of conscious- 
ness is our own bodies : — hence the bodily miseries, 
the over-sensitiveness and the squeamishness of the 
idle. The next "nearest thing " is our poor scanty outfit 
of powers and virtues. Small and cheap they look in 
their naked isolation, and the one big thing that they 
can produce is shadows. The shadow of whatever is 
■ crowded up close to the light of consciousness is big 
enough to blacken the whole world. Hence discourage- 
ment is a natural and blameless consequence when 
idleness blocks the light of consciousness. To be idle 
is to be shut in, and in such confinement one feels 
powerless and insignificant. 

The platform speaker whose audience is deserting 
him hears his own voice pronouncing words which 



16 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

hitherto have sounded valuable and potent; — now 
they seem tawdry and foolish. He has been left high 
and dry, alone with his naked self. Before the exodus 
he had courage because he could lose himself in his 
subject. He had an audience and a message for them. 
They clothed him, dignified him, gave worth to his 
vocal gymnastics and meaning to his oratorical labors. 
But without the response of his audience he is merely 
a voice, a ghost haunting a world that has forgotten him. 

Work gives every man an audience and a message. 
Through work his personality, small enough in itself, 
gets out of itself and acquires a strange and blessed 
ownership of fruitful soil. For his job certainly belongs 
to him in some sense. It is his spiritual property, and 
thus, like all property, it gives courage because it en- 
riches personality. Deprived of work and its comrade- 
ship, we are lonely and therefore discouraged, for lone- 
liness is so close to discouragement that it is hard to 
slip the knife-blade of a definition between them. 

To find one's work is to find one's place in the world. 
Most discouragement means homelessness ; when down- 
cast there seems to be no place for us in the world. 
Everybody else seems to be needed and to belong 
somewhere. But in idleness no one is needed. Idly to 
watch the busy people in one's own country or abroad 
is a heart-breaking business. Hence prolonged travel 
is bearable only if one adopts some plan of work, makes 
a business of sight-seeing, or in some other way earns 
every day one's appreciable share of knowledge. 



THE CALL OF THE JOB 17 

I have said that a job is a special form of property. 
One gets a right to it, as to any form of property, in pro- 
portion as one works it up, by making it fruitful for 
some community, visible or invisible. The scientific 
investigator, the inventor, the unappreciated artist, 
the martyr, works for an invisible community not yet 
born, or hidden on the other side of the earth or else- 
where. If he escapes discouragement, it is because he 
has learned to see an audience invisible to others. 
Without this he is hopeless. Whoever is forced to work 
where he cannot see with the spirits sense this invisible 
community and cannot "paint the thing as he sees it 
for the God of things as they are/' becomes disheart- 
ened and may have to seek some smaller but more tan- 
gible piece of property, some task bringing with it an 
heartening social recognition. 

Courage for life, then, comes when one gets out of 
isolation, owns, surveys, and fences in a bit of the 
uncharted world. Such a place-in-the-world is a job. 
It matters little whether others see it or not, but if you 
cannot see it yourself, you are lost in the wilderness. 
The courage given us by our work is like the self-re- 
liance which Emerson has made forever glorious. Like 
self-reliance, courage is ultimately a reliance on widen- 
ing concentric circles cf property which reach to God. 

As a physician I have had the happiness of seeing 
work cure many persons who have suffered from that 
trembling palsy of the soul which results from over- 



18 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

mastering doubts, hesitation, vacillation, and fear. 
Work often cures this kind of skepticism (" solvitur 
ambulando"), which is not thinking but worry. It 
comes from thinking in a circle instead of thinking 
straight. 

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character, or pendulous swing. 

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THE CALL OF THE JOB 19 

" Break away," says the wise world. For this sort 
of thing is checked by breaking out anywhere into the 
real world and going straight in any direction. The 
"pale cast of worry'* was what Hamlet miscalled 
"thought." Thought is good, and so is action, but 
circularity is neither thought nor action, nor anything 
but a round dance of badly trained brain cells. 

Many doubts and fears of the circular type are cured 
by work, because it gives us the evidence needed to 
banish the fear. " Mr. Accomplishment " is the witness 
whom we must secure, because the doubts and fears 
that we are talking about now are doubts of one's own 
powers, or fears of one 's own weakness. A doctor or 
friend may asseverate till he is black in the face: " You 
have this power; you need n't fear that weakness." But 
nothing convinces, or ought to convince in such a mat- 
ter, except waking up to find one's self actually doing 
the thing for which one could not, by taking thought, 
conceive one's strength sufficient. 

In all such healing of worry through work we begin 
with a plunge and a submersion of consciousness. For 
"action," when we contrast it with "thought," means 
an amazing descent into the arms of the elemental 
which supports us and carries us to achievement across 
a gulf of unconsciousness. In singing one throws the 
voice at a high note wisely oblivious of just how one 
gets there. One measures the stream before leaping it, 
but not in the moment of the leap. In enthusiasm, 
elan, and the most successful flights of invention or 



20 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

creative art, we shut our eyes, and surrender ourselves 
into the hands of some force that we trust but cannot 
watch. How does this differ from recklessness and 
jumping at conclusions? It differs in its preparation. 
The life that we have lived before we thus surrender 
ourselves guides us even in our passivity. Training and 
conscious practice lead us up to the brink of the gulf 
and fix the direction of our leap. But the final plunge, 
the miracle of fresh achievement, cometh not during 
observation, but in darkness when the sun has set. 



CHAPTER III 

THE JOY OF WORK 

Sunday, September 15, 1907, I could not find a 
seat in Faneuil Hall, Boston's colonial relic, where 
President Dennis Driscoll, of the Boston Central Labor 
Union was to answer what President Eliot had said 
on the previous Sunday on the rights, duties, and privi- 
leges of the manual laborer. With manual laborers the 
hall was so crowded that I found standing-room only 
in the middle aisle. President Driscoll finished what he 
had to say about the ''closed shop" and turned to 
another topic : — 

''President Eliot spoke last Sunday to us working- 
men about The Joy of Work!" said the speaker, and 
paused. Then as he lifted his head from his manuscript 
and looked out over the crowded hall, a sound of de- 
risive laughter spread in wave after wave over the 
audience. There was but one thing to think of such 
an idea as "The Joy of Work." It was a bitter joke. 
To the workmen present, it was really ludicrous that 
a man could be so foolish, so ignorant of manual work 
as to believe that there is any enjoyment in it. 

To me that laughter was one of the saddest facts 
that I have faced. This audience of manual workers 
was instantly and instinctively of one mind. Their 
leader had no need even to express his thought. It 



22 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

was enough to put together in one sentence the idea of 
joy and the idea of work; the absurdity, the contra- 
diction, was then self-evident. Any joy that was to come 
to them must come out of working hours. Their work 
was drudgery to which they were bound by the ancient 
curse: " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." 
But though necessity bound them, their minds were 
still free to protest. If work were already full of joy, 
would they, the manual workers, be united to change 
and improve the conditions of labor? Their very 
existence as members of "organized labor," their very 
presence in that hall, meant that they were vehe- 
mently dissatisfied with their work and with one whom 
they viewed as a soft-handed academic professor, ig- 
norant of the actual conditions of modern manual work, 
and therefore deluded enough to suppose that there is 
joy in it. How little they knew President Eliot! 

I have told this incident to sharpen further the pre- 
viously defined distinction between work and drudgery. 
Even if drudgery has its blessings, 1 it is surely no bless- 
ing to him whose life contains little or nothing else. For 
President Driscoll's audience the satisfactions of 
drudgery (though President Eliot called it work) were 
nonexistent. They did not know what he was talking 
about, and he (they felt sure) did not know their lives. 
His "work" was their "play." In the zest of their 
labor-union discussions (never thought of as "work"), 
they perhaps got nearer to the enjoyment of something 

k 1 W. C. Gannett, D.D., "Blessed be drudgery.'^ 



THE JOY OF WORK 23 

which he would have called work than at any other 
time ; but they never imagined that he could mean any- 
thing like that. 

Much, perhaps most, that is called work in modern 
industrial society weighs upon the laborer as a blight 
and a burden, something to be hated and so far as may 
be banished out of life. Now we can all agree, can't we, 
that whatever feels like this ought not to be praised 
and cultivated? We may say that this is slavery, not 
real work, that it is the abuse, not the fruition, of man's 
labor. But then we must not extol indiscriminately 
all that goes by the name of work. 

A rich man may find it very good fun to task his 
muscles now and then with wood-chopping or horse- 
shoeing, but he is a fool if he supposes that the wood- 
chopper or the horse-shoer gets this amateur's pleasure 
out of his trade. "Arizona is a delightful place to live, 
is n't it?" I said to a consumptive doctor whom I met 
on his daily rounds near Flagstaff. "Oh, yes," he an- 
swered, "if you don't have to live here." The tourist's, 
the greenhorn's, the amateur's view of manual work 
dwells on its picturesque, its novel, and exciting aspects. 
But this is rightly rejected by the day laborer. Who 
can blame him for indignation against those who praise 
manual work because they have never done any? 

But is it so bad, even in present-day factory condi- 
tions, — is it so joyless as President Driscoll's audience 
felt it to be that Sunday afternoon? Was there not 



24 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

something of pure misunderstanding and cross-pur- 
poses in that lamentable mirth at President Eliot's 
expense? Question any prosperous, hustling American 
male (who would sooner work than eat) ; put to him the 
question, "Do you find joy in your work?" he will 
deny it with an oath or with a good version of the de- 
risive laugh which I heard in Faneuil Hall. 

For in the first place " joy " is too " hifalutin " a word 
for him to take upon his lips. It recalls to him some 
pink-and-blue-ribboned frivolity, or the grotesque 
frenzy of a religious camp-meeting. If you asked: 
"How do you like your job? " or if you got him talking 
about its technicalities, there would ooze out in his 
talk something of his solid satisfaction in it, some of its 
spice and variety, even some genuine emotion about 
its rewards and adventures. I have asked that question 
of a great many workingmen under conditions of inti- 
macy when mutual understanding was to be relied 
upon, and I never received more than two or three 
negative answers. If we ask about "joy," then na- 
tional peculiarities, masculine shyness, and fear of 
emotion play a part in the discouraging answers. 
There is an instinct, too, against the vivisection of this 
fragile element, — joy, — from out the tissue of working 
life. 

Yet, even in manual labor, just as it is in America 
to-day and with all our sins and blunders upon its head, 
there is still, I believe, much satisfaction to the work- 
man. Else why is it that when he is sick he complains 



THE JOY OF WORK 25 

in that most pregnant phrase: "Doctor, IVe lost all 
my ambition"? By ambition he means zest and spirit 
for work. A mere slave, a hopeless drudge, would not 
know what this "ambition" meant. One cannot lose 
one's appetite for life and work unless despite their 
monotony and strain they once tasted good. The sense 
of competence, the conscious possession of skill that 
the apprentice cannot learn in many months, — there 
is almost always some satisfaction in that. Then the 
comradeship in work, the gossip and jokes over it, the 
twist and turn of the unexpected in every day's work, 
the appreciation of friends and onlookers, all these 
weave about the monotonous job a web of genuine 
interest. The job itself, — parts of it, anyway, — may 
then become as automatic as breathing or eating. Only 
the invalid is oppressed by the curse of labor in his 
physiological functions, as he draws his breath, chews 
his meat, or handles his knife and fork. 

Yet President Driscoll's speech, his audience, and 
their scorn of President Eliot's "joy of work " are facts 
which we must take seriously to heart. For any other 
audience of manual laborers would doubtless have 
laughed just as bitterly at the idea that there was joy 
in their work — partly, as I believe, from dislike of 
the word "joy," partly from misunderstanding of the 
speaker's motive, but largely because they believe that 
they have been forced, without any choice of their 
own, into work in which they do not believe they are 



26 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

getting their fair share of return, in which they cannot 
recognize their own achievement, and in which they 
get no human touch with their employers. It is not so 
much the work itself, nor even its unhealthful condi- 
tions that wage-earners resent. It is rather the state 
of society by reason of which (as they believe), some- 
one no better or wiser than they, someone whom they 
never chose to lead them, has usurped the right to force 
work upon them under unsanitary conditions and at 
low wages. Social and political leaders they can choose. 
" Captains of industry" they must find and follow, too 
often, with bitter protest. 

To remedy these great evils economic readjustments, 
— socialism or some halfway house on the road to it, — 
will doubtless be tried within the next few decades. But 
no one will like his job any better unless not only the 
economic but the psychical conditions are notably 
improved. Above all, our personal relations and per- 
sonal ideals must improve, else economic reforms will 
amount to nothing. Things are bad; but it is people, 
not mere things that make them so. Economic reforms, 
better hours and wages, will do good if they mirror and 
accompany an improvement in your character and mine ; 
not otherwise. As fast as we grow more honest, more 
generous, and more ambitious, we shall make a better 
industrial system and a new form of government to 
clothe our larger powers. Meantime "class conscious- 
ness," which means class hatred, delays our advance. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE POINTS OF A GOOD JOB 

In the crude job as we get it there is much rubbish. 
For work is a very human product. It is no better 
than we have made it, and even when it is redeemed 
from brutal drudgery it is apt to be scarred and warped 
by our stupidities and our ineptitudes. Out of the 
rough-hewn masses in which work comes to us, it is our 
business, it is civilization's business, to shape a voca- 
tion fit for man. We shall have to remake it again 
and again; meantime, before we reject what we now 
have, it is worth while to see what we want. 

What (besides better hours, better wages, wealthier 
conditions) are the points of a good job? Imagine a 
sensible man looking for satisfactory work, a voca- 
tional adviser guiding novices towards the best avail- 
able occupation, and a statesman trying to mould the 
industrial world somewhat nearer to the heart's desire, 
— what should they try for? Physical and financial 
standards determine what we get out of our work. But 
what shall we get in it? Much or little, I answer, ac- 
cording to its fitness or unfitness for our personality, — 
a factor much neglected nowadays. 

Among the points of a good job I shall name seven: 
(i) Difficulty and crudeness enough to call out our 
latent powers of mastery. (2) Variety so balanced by 



28 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

monotony as to suit the individual's needs. (3) A boss. 
(4) A chance to achieve, to build something and to 
recognize what we have done. (5) A title and a place 
which is ours. (6) Connection with some institution, 
some firm, or some cause, which we can loyally serve. 
(7) Honorable and pleasant relation with our com- 
rades in work. Fulfill these conditions and work is 
one of the best things in life. Let me describe them 
more fully. 

We want a chance to subdue. Boys like to go stamping 
through the woods in thick-soled boots. They like to 
crush the sticks in their path and to jerk off the 
branches that get in their way. If there is need to clear 
a path, so much the better; the pioneer's instinct is 
the more strongly roused. For there is in most of us 
an ancient hunger to subdue the chances which we 
meet, to tame what is wild. As another's anger calls 
out ours, so the stubbornness of nature rouses our de- 
termination to subdue it. We want to encounter the 
raw and crude. Before the commercial age, war, hunt- 
ing, and agriculture gave us this foil. We want it still, 
and for the lack of it often find our work too soft. 

Of course, we can easily get an overdose of crude 
resistance. A good job should offer us a fair chance of 
our winning. We have no desire to be crushed without 
a struggle. But we are all the better pleased if the fish 
makes a good fight before he yields. 

Not only in the wilderness, but wherever we deal 



THE POINTS OF A GOOD JOB 29 

with raw material, our hands meet adventures. Every 
bit of wood and stone, every stream and every season, 
has its own tantalizing but fascinating individuality; 
and as long as we have health and courage, these novel- 
ties strike not as frustration but as challenge. 

Even in half-tamed products, like leather or steel, 
there are, experts tell me, incalculable variations which 
keep us on the alert if we are still close enough to the 
elemental to feel its fascinating materiality. When a 
clerk sells dry-goods over the counter, I suppose he has 
to nourish his frontiersman's spirit chiefly in foiling the 
wily bargain-hunter or trapping the incautious country- 
man. But I doubt if the work is as interesting as a 
carpenter's or a plumber's. It reeks so strong of civili- 
zation and the "finished product" that it often sends 
us back to the woods to seek in a "vacation" that 
touch with the elemental which should properly form 
part of daily work. 

We want both monotony and variety. The monotony 
of work is perhaps the quality of which we most often 
complain, — often justifiably. Yet monotony is really 
demanded by almost every one. Even children cry 
for it, though in doses smaller than those that suit 
their elders. Your secretary does not like her work if 
you put more than her regular portion of variety into 
it. She does not want to be constantly undertaking new 
tasks, adapting herself to new situations. She wants 
some regularity in her traveling, some plain stretches in 



30 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

which she can get up speed and feel quantity of accom- 
plishment; that is, she wants a reasonable amount of 
monotony. Change and novelty in work are apt to 
demand fresh thought, and to reduce our speed. 

Of course, there is a limit to this. We want some va- 
riety, some independence in our work. But we can 
easily get too much. I have heard as many complaints 
and felt in myself as many objections against variety 
as against monotony. I have seen and felt as much dis- 
content with "uncharted freedom" as with irksome 
restraint. Bewilderment, a sense of incompetence and 
of rudderless drifting, are never far off from any one of 
us in our work. There is in all of us something that 
likes to trot along in harness, — not too tight or galling, 
to be sure, — but still in guidance and with support. 
That makes us show our best paces. 

Nor is there anything slavish or humiliating in this. 
It is simply the admission that we are not ready at 
every moment to be original, inventive, creative! We 
have found out the immense strain and cost of fresh 
thinking. We are certain that we were not born to be 
at it perpetually. We want some rest in our work, some 
relief from high tension. Monotony supplies that relief. 
Moreover the rhythmic and habitual elements in us (an- 
cient, labor-saving devices) demand their representa- 
tion. To do something again and again, as the trees, 
the birds, and our own hearts do, is a fundamental 
need which demands and receives satisfaction in work 
as well as in play. 



THE POINTS OF A GOOD JOB 31 

For the tragedies and abominations, the slaveries and 
degradations, of manual labor, we cannot put all the 
blame on the large element of monotony and repeti- 
tion which such labor often contains. We should revolt 
and destroy any undertaking that was not somewhat 
monotonous. But the point is that work ought to offer 
to each worker as much variety and independence as 
he has originality and genius, no more and no less. Give 
us either more or less than our share and we are miser- 
able. We can be crushed and overdriven by too much 
responsibility, as well as by too little. Our initiative as 
well as our docility can be overworked. 

We want a boss, especially in heavy or monotonous 
work. Most monotonous work is of the sort that is cut 
out and supplied ready to hand. This implies that some 
one else plans and directs it. If we are to do the pulling, 
some one else should hold the reins. When I am digging 
my wife's garden-beds, I want her to specify where they 
shall go. We all want a master of some kind, and most 
of us want a master in human shape. The more manual 
our work is the more we want him. Boatmen poling a 
scow through a creek need some one to steer and to tell 
them which should push harder as they turn the bends 
of the stream. The steersman may be chosen by lot 
or each may steer in turn, but some boss we must have, 
for when we are poling we can't well steer and we don't 
want the strain of trying fruitlessly to do both. This 
example seems to me to typify a large proportion of the 



32 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

world's work. It demands to be bossed, and it is more 
efficient, even more original, when it is bossed, — just 
enough ! 

Monotony, then, and bossing we need," but in our 
own quantity and also of our own kind. For there are 
different kinds (as well as different doses) and some are 
better than others. For example, to go to the same place 
of work every day is a monotony that simplifies life 
advantageously for most of us, but to teach the same 
subject over and over again is for most teachers an 
evil, though it may be just now a necessary evil. 

We must try to distinguish. When we delight in 
thinking ourselves abused, or allow ourselves the luxury 
of grumbling, we often single out monotony as the tar- 
get of our wrath. But we must not take all complaints 
(our own or other people's) at their face value. A coat 
is a misfit if it is too big or too small, or if it puckers 
in the wrong place. A job can be a misfit in twenty 
different ways and can be complained of in as many 
different tones. Let us be clear about this. If our 
discontent is as divine as it feels, it is not because 
all monotony is evil, but because our own particular 
share and kind of monotony have proved to be a de- 
grading waste of energy. 

We want to, see the product of our work. The bridge we 
planned, the house we built, the shoes we cobbled, help 
us to get before ourselves and so to realize more than 
a moment's worth of life and effort. The impermanence 



THE POINTS OF A GOOD JOB 33 

of each instant's thought, the transience of every flush 
of effort, tends to make our lives seem shadowy even 
to ourselves. Our memory is a sieve through which 
most that we pick up runs back like sand. But in work 
we find refuge and stability, for in the accumulated 
product of many days' labor we can build up and pre- 
sent at last to our own sight the durable structure of 
what we meant to do. Then we can believe that our 
intentions, our hopes, our plans, our daily food and 
drink, have not passed through us for nothing, for we 
have funded their worth in some tangible achievement 
which outlasts them. 

Further, such external proofs of our efficiency win 
us not only self-respect, but the recognition of others. 
We need something to show for ourselves, something 
to prove that our dreams are not impotent. Work gives 
us the means to prove it. 

I want to acknowledge here my agreement in the 
charge often brought against modern factory labor, — 
namely, that since no workman plans or finishes his 
product, no one can recognize his product, take pride 
in it, or see its defects. Even when factory labor 
is well paid, its impersonal and wholesale merging of 
the man in the machine goes far to make it unfit for 
men and women. 

"Goes far," I say, — but not the whole way. For 
division of labor means specialism, and specialism, as 
we know in the professions, has its glories despite its 
dangers. A specialty, as Professor G. H. Palmer has 



34 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

told us, 1 can be a window through which we look out 
on all the world. One subject, deeply studied, gives us 
clues and analogies to many others, gives us member- 
ship in the freemasonry of those who have mastered 
something, develops the power to respect and the right 
to be respected. I have known as patients men who, 
through their mastery of one small process in watch- 
making, had developed a liberal outlook on other 
difficult arts, a just pride in good workmanship and 
an inventor's energy. This is not common or easy in 
any sort of specialism, but it is never impossible. 

We want a handle to our name. Every one has a right 
to the distinction which titles of nobility are meant to 
give, but it is from our work that we should get them. 
The grocer, the trapper, the night-watchman, the cook, 
is a person fit to be recognized, both by his own timid 
self and by the rest of the world. In time the title of 
our job comes to stand for us, to enlarge our personal- 
ity and to give us permanence. Thus it supplements the 
standing which is given us by our product. To "hold 
down a job" gives us a place in the world, something 
approaching the home for which in some form or other 
every one longs. "Have you any place for me?" we 
ask with eagerness; for until we find "a place" we are 
tramps, men without a country. 

A man with a job has, at least in embryo, the kind of 
recognition from his own gang which we all crave. He 

1 G. H. Palmer, The Teacher, chap. VI. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908. 



THE POINTS OF A GOOD JOB 35 

has won membership in a club that he wants to belong 
to and especially hates to be left out of. To be in it as 
a member in full standing gives a taste of self-respect 
and self-confidence. 

Despite certain puritanical traditions there are many 
people who like to accent the fact of their member- 
ship in the great club of job-holders by some scrap of 
uniform, partly because this distinguishes them still 
further from the untitled. A decidedly amateurish 
pastry-cook of my acquaintance shifted from his bak- 
ery into private service at the first opportunity, but 
the flat-topped white cap which he had acquired in the 
bakery he cherished still when he was set to work in 
the tiny kitchen of a mountain shanty. It was his badge 
of office and he was proud of it. Why should nurses 
and naval officers have uniforms and rejoice in them, 
while bankers and professors remain undistinguished? 
I see no good reason for the arbitrary decrees of fashion 
in such matters. While on duty I think every trade and 
every profession should have its distinguishing dress. 
Our common citizenship while off duty would then be 
all the better expressed. 

I have been trying to point out the features which 
ought to dignify and enrich our work. Mastery, tangible 
achievement, and the title which goes with even the 
most unsatisfactory job enlarge our personality by 
making us stand for something permanent and recog- 
nizable. So does connection with a firm, a college, a 
municipality, a labor union, a trade association. The 



36 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

consciousness of membership takes away something 
of the self-seeking character of economic effort. Even 
when we feel hostile to the people or the policies just 
now in control of our working group, we find both a 
stimulus and a wholesome restraint in the member- 
ship. 

We want congeniality with our fellow workmen. One 
of the few non-physical "points" which people have 
already learned to look for in selecting work is the tem- 
per and character of the "boss." Men, and especially 
women, care almost as much about this as about the 
hours and wages of the job. Young physicians will work 
in a laboratory at starvation wages for the sake of being 
near a great teacher, even though he rarely notices 
them. The congeniality of fellow workmen is almost 
as important as the temper of the boss. Two un- 
friendly stenographers in a single room will often give 
up their work and take lower wages elsewhere in order 
to escape each other. 

All this is so obvious to those who look for jobs that 
I wonder why so few employers have noticed it. The 
housewives who keep their servants, the manufac- 
turers who avoid strikes, are not always those who pay 
the best wages and offer the best conditions of work. 
The human facts, the personal relations of employer 
and employee, are often disregarded, but always at 
the employer's peril. The personal factor is as great 
as the economic in the industrial unrest of to-day. 



THE POINTS OF A GOOD JOB 37 

Are not even the "captains of industry" beginning to 
wake up to this fact? 

The psychical standards which I have now tried to 
enumerate, — balanced variety and monotony, initia- 
tive and supervision, the chance to subjugate nature or 
personally to create something, pleasant companion- 
ship, a title and an institutional connection, — go far 
to give us happiness in work. But even if we have the 
ideal job there is much in the temper with which we 
take it. Our temperament may be one of those incur- 
ably sad or anxious ones that can never pluck any values 
out of daily existence or draw them from the future 
by anticipation. The remedies for this are hard to 
seek. They can rarely be found in work, sometimes in 
play, in love, or in worship. 



CHAPTER V 

THE REPROACH OF COMMERCIALISM: THOUGHT AND 
ACTION IN WORK 

If any one tells me that Modern America is lament- 
ably, even dangerously, weak in the capacity to ap- 
preciate the accumulated treasures of literature, to 
learn the lesson of history, and to distinguish true from 
shoddy goods in philosophy and art, I have to agree. 
Nor can I deny that we are ludicrously unaware of the 
exuberant life of the trees and flowers, so close around 
us, so full of their own kind of ingenuity, skill, and 
strength, as well as of beauty. We don't know much 
about animals, clouds, mountains, or rivers, — which 
could give us pointers about our jobs as well as a shiver 
of admiration at the way they do theirs. We are dunces 
at music, sculpture, poetry, religion. The only arts we 
appreciate are drama, dancing, and baseball, the only 
"literature" we read is in the newspapers. 

Yet, when my old friend Thomas Davidson 1 used 
to rail at the commercialism of our time and compare 
our life disdainfully with that of Athens, its temples 
with our factories, its Platonic and Aristotelian wisdom 
with our cheap newspaper sensationalism, its art with 
our ugliness, I always wondered what would become 
of a people all of whom sat under apple trees writ- 

1 C. W. Bakewell, Thomas Davidson: A Memoir. 



THE REPROACH OF COMMERCIALISM 39 

ing poetry. We can no more live by admiring each 
other's sculpture than by taking in each other's wash- 
ing. It would be an awful fate to live among a nation 
of artists and philosophers, or to read nothing but 
epics and sonnets in the morning paper. Like most 
of those who hanker after Greek perfection, Davidson 
seemed to ignore the fact that only a vast subterranean 
foundation of slave labor and trade made possible the 
precarious superstructure of Greek art and philosophy. 

At Brook Farm, where in the early forties the re- 
formers tried to abolish commercialism, the result was 
that a few devoted people nearly slaved themselves to 
death while the rest of the party felt themselves ' ' called ' ' 
to comparatively easy tasks. Take away our "com- 
mercialism" and we should obviously starve; but even 
while the provisions lasted we should be bored and 
miserable. Poets and prophets leaven the lump of 
ordinary humanity ; but to live with a townf ul of them 
would be as insufferable as eating twenty dinners on 
end. Most art and most philosophy ought to be the 
by-product or the holiday adventure of lives soaked 
through by the teaching of more humdrum occupations. 
The artistic, philosophic, literary, or scientific specialist 
ought always to be as rare as a jewel or a high light, 
getting his meaning and power from his setting. 

Without commercialism, most folks, while waiting 
for starvation, would have to loaf or tramp. They would 
be far more unhappy as well as far more vicious than 
they are now. For Satan is still on the job. The human 



4 o WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

world has always been a commercial world, busy for 
the most part like the birds in getting its living. 

Whether we are socialists or apostles of art, culture, 
and the spiritual life, all that we have a right to object 
to in modern commercialism is that while centralizing 
industry it has also partially crushed individuality. The 
man who made a whole house and who lived in a whole 
house must have developed in the process more human 
nature, more skill, ingenuity, and resource than the 
man who specializes on window blinds and lives in a 
tenement. 

No one admires the type of man who lives on bana- 
nas in a tropical island and usually can't be hired to 
work, because a few days' labor each year will feed him. 
We all agree, I take it, that we should n't want (even 
if we could get it) a planet peopled with beautiful child- 
like loafers such as Stevenson and LaFarge found in the 
islands of the Pacific. We agree that men need regular 
work, with hardship, responsibility, and strain, not as 
their chief reward, but as an element in their daily 
occupation. The robust, the resourceful, the venture- 
some, the tough, persistent characteristics which we 
all prize in men and women don't develop (so far as 
anybody knows) in vacuo, — without the pressure and 
drive which if overdone beget slavery. As long as we 
prize these characteristics we shall always need to 
keep a sharp lookout lest industry make slaves of us. 
There is something fearful about the industry of great 
and fruitful workers, something ascetic and at times 



THE REPROACH OF COMMERCIALISM 41 

almost barbaric. They narrowly escape being con- 
quered by their work. 

But such narrow escapes for the soul are not peculiar 
to commercialism. The advancing organization of 
science is always close to pedantry; the possessor of 
good habits is always on the verge of becoming a crea- 
ture of habit, the person of acute sensibility is always 
on the brink of sentimentalism. No age and no organi- 
zation of society can escape such dangers. Any one who 
thinks we can get more of the benefits of organized in- 
dustry with less of its dreadful by-products must show 
us how to do it. Meantime, it is idiotic for us to 
reproach ourselves and our age for being commercial. 
We can blame ourselves only for not being more of 
something else beside commercial, or for being commer- 
cial in so unintelligent a way; for a man without 
muscles would be no more of a monstrosity than an 
age without commerce. I think that commerce, like 
muscles, can be made beautiful, intelligent, and re- 
sourceful as well as powerful. To make it so is our 
present need. 

Many of those who decry " commercialism' ' are 
fond of accenting the contrast between those who work 
with their brains and those whose work they suppose 
to be merely manual or muscular. In their desire to 
exalt the spiritual powers of man they are fond of mak- 
ing a hierarchy in which lawyers, writers, teachers, 
poets, philosophers, preachers, and statesmen come at 



42 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

the top, while those who use their senses and their 
muscles come at the bottom. 

But is head-work nobler than hand-work? Should we 
all strive to become brain-workers as far and as fast as 
we can? Or at the other extreme is Tolstoy right when 
he insists that every one should do " bread-work,' ' 
something that directly increases the amount of food 
upon the earth? 

The important distinction which these phrases are 
meant to mark is that between thought and action: — 
thought plans action; action executes thought. The 
instant that thought relinquishes its task of exploring 
the future and closes the office where various plans and 
alterations are being appraised, a relatively mechanical 
" carrying-out" process begins. Simply to carry out a 
fixed and detailed plan is so machine-like that a ma- 
chine will probably be devised to do it better. For the 
new machines that carry out the logical consequences 
of any proposition, the machines that copy or that per- 
form the arithmetical process of adding, subtracting, 
multiplying, and dividing, are not the less machines 
because they do what is often called "clerical" work. 
They do not call up the past, they do not plan or choose 
between future alternatives. 

It would seem, then, as if all labor is tending to be- 
come more and more motionless and mental while 
many machines and a few unskilled machine-tenders 
take from the skilled workers and the entrepreneurs 
the monotonous, exhausting, mindless portions of the 



THE REPROACH OF COMMERCIALISM 43 

world's work. But while this is something like the 
truth, there are some further facts, rather shy and un- 
noticed, that make the separation of thought and action 
even less wide. 

Mr. Greenhorn's plans have this form: "I will say 
to Nature x; she will answer y; I will then rejoin with 
2"; and so on. For example, "I will get an axe and 
chop into the base of that tree. It will fall toward the 
stream and I will then tow it down." Or: "I will put 
this patient in a sanitarium. She will get rested. I will 
then take out her appendix." Or: "I will buy some of 
this railroad stock offered me as a special favor. I will 
go in 'on the ground floor,' and when the railroad flour- 
ishes, I shall get rich." 

The second step in each of these processes, the spon- 
taneous maturing of our project, is the one on which 
labor men suppose "capitalists" are resting. Nature 
carries out our plan: we sit back and cut the coupons 
when they mature. But do things work out so? The 
tree we planned to fall into the stream gets caught 
overhead in a most unforeseeable way. It can be worked 
free; but a new plan, modifying the old one, must be 
made first. The patient's "rest cure" may not rest 
her at all. I may find that nothing rests her but work, 
and meantime the appendix quiets down and does n't 
have to be removed. 

The material into which our plan burrows like 
a tunnel under construction, is always more or less 
refractory. Whether it is the actors of our cast, the 



44 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

characters of our novel, the voters of our district, the 
members of our week-end party, the steel of our cast- 
ings, the wood we are carving, — in any case the "ma- 
terial" resists more or less. Hence we are forced to 
feel our way and to form while in action a considerable 
part of our plan. 

Though this is trite and obvious, we often forget it 
when we are declaiming about the divorce of manual 
labor from mental work, or the chasm between thought 
and action. Good thinking feels its way by action. Good 
manual work is full of thought. Is the sculptor's task 
manual or mental? Of course bad sculpture may be 
purely manual (that is, purely imitative or conven- 
tional). There is also an opposite kind of sculptural 
monstrosity, which looks as if it were gnawed out of 
the stone by a man without hands. Does a man sing 
with his soul or with his vocal cords? Some " vocal 
artists" seem to be all vocalization and nothing else; 
some voiceless sentimentalists seem to be trying to sing 
without opening their mouths. But is n't it clear as day 
that brain and muscle wait each upon the other for the 
opportunity to do what God meant them to do? The 
wise thought, the successful plan says: "I'll say to 
Nature x, and then see what she says. My next step, 
y } will depend upon her answer." Her answer comes to 
us through our muscles and our senses, and keeps us 
alive from head to foot. It is married to our thought 
and completes it. 

We cannot value manual work, — what Tolstoy 



THE REPROACH OF COMMERCIALISM 45 

calls " bread-work," — merely because it is not brain- 
work. Yet his warnings may be greatly needed. He is 
right in telling us that we may get warped and neuras- 
thenic, cold-hearted and footless, if our muscles are 
never used, our vitality never husbanded by the mono- 
tony of routine and the simplicity of the elemental. 
Yet farmers are not all wise and virtuous. Tolstoy's 
solution of our difficulty is too simple. If the race is 
getting stunted and neurotic, puny and degenerate, 
because it is tied down to any particular kind of work, 
disproportionately manual or mental, it is time for 
revolution or reform. Somewhere in our life, in our 
play, if not in our work, every part and element in us 
ought to find a chance to praise God in its own fashion. 

If indoor work, machine work, literary work, farm 
work, or any other job leaves a large part of us unserv- 
iceable, then we ought either to find some outlet for 
that strength during the hours away from work or to 
change the work. But I don't find that agriculture has 
turned out any better type of man than railroading and 
shopkeeping. That it weakens health is a serious indict- 
ment of any trade ; but so far we have no proof that the 
health of manual workers is any better than the health 
of those of us who use our brains as well as our hands. 

Tolstoy does not convince me that we are always 
kinder, more neighborly, more comradely in the more 
elemental and manual trades than in brain-work. A 
touch of nature does make all the world kin, but it is a 
touch rather than prolonged pressure. The elemental, 



46 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

impinging in the form of sharp, brief illness, may bring 
a family together. But chronic illness, prolonged and 
infiltrated through days, nights, meals, and holidays, 
may estrange and embitter a family. A party of peo- 
ple cruising on a yacht get wonderfully friendly and 
even intimate during a week's trip, provided the yacht 
is not so luxurious as to exclude them from the work 
of sailing her. But this is true just because the contact 
with elemental life is a massing one. A shortage of 
food or even the long co muance of comfortable cruis- 
ing life sometimes wea: out nature's power to make our 
souls kin. When we are tied to such a life, as Dana 
was in his "Two Years before the Mast," we do not 
appear to treat each other more kindly than the city 
folk. 

Action staged always among elemental conditions 
cannot be trusted to make us wise. But neither can we 
depend upon slippered " thinkers" for wisdom. If the 
problem is to know what 's wrong with a business, what 
people will buy, how an election is to be won, or when 
the psychological moment for action has arrived, he is 
most likely to be right who can muster the widest range 
of human experiences, hold them fairly before him in 
review, like a hand of cards, and then judge. 

A state superintendent of education might seem to 
be as much emancipated from the need of manual work 
as any one could be. He deals with mental and spirit- 
ual problems, with the course of study, with the per- 
sonalities of teachers and pupils, the humor of parents, 



THE REPROACH OF COMMERCIALISM 47 

school, committees, and legislatures. True; but that 
is not all. He has also to test out courses in music, 
drawing, physical culture, hygiene, manual and indus- 
trial training, and even if he decides to rule them all 
out of his curriculum, he must know just what they are 
before he can exclude them wisely. He will be unfair 
to athletics, to drawing, to forge-work, to folk-dancing, 
nature study, or sex hygiene, unless he is an all-round 
man and not merely a pedagogue. He must have done 
enough work with every sense, with every muscle, to 
know its worth and its dangers 

Just what dose of original planning and what stint 
of executing other people's plans is good for each indi- 
vidual is never a fixed quantity. But every one needs 
both, and therefore no one can make a hierarchy with 
the "mental" or "spiritual" tasks at the top and the 
"manual" ones at the bottom. The proportion of 
thought and of action which is proper to each of us 
depends somewhat upon our age. Hence the ordinary 
process of promotion from less responsible and simpler 
to more complex and difficult positions as men get older 
is, I think, somewhere near what it ought to be. For 
old men are apt to be wiser in counsel ; to use and bal- 
ance their energies they need less of a grapple with the 
elemental than when they were young. They ought not 
to be hustling like the youngsters, for if they really 
were youngsters once and were not born old, all the old 
activities of eye, ear, and hand, all the crudities and 
the elementals will sit as representatives in the chamber 



48 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

of their minds and contribute their vote when called 
for. 

Commercialism, then, should not be used as a term 
of reproach. Like romanticism or asceticism it has its 
good and its bad side. What it needs is reshaping to 
fit our actual needs rather than the accidents of develop- 
ment. Remembering how intolerable a world of poets 
and philosophers would be, we should never say or 
imply that work which deals largely with material ob- 
jects is any lower in the scale of worth than the calling 
of the thinker or the scholar. For science and art are 
most intimately concerned with the material world and 
derive from it their expressions of truth and beauty. 
The practice of any art or craft cuts clean across the dis- 
tinctions between "mental" and " manual" work and 
weaves both into a truer whole. 

Let us abolish terms like " physical culture" or 
" mental training." To be concerned either with one's 
mind or one's body is a morbid practice. One should 
be occupied with tasks that make us forget both mind 
and body in a higher union of both. 

Thought is not nobler than action. It is the first or 
last stage of action and its worth depends on the act 
which it plans or mirrors. Good thinking is reshaped 
again and again by contact with the obstacles and de- 
murrers of its material. The proportions of thought and 
action, of commerce and poetry, in any life, must be 
worked out by each person, each nation, and each age 
to fit individual needs. 



THE REPROACH OF COMMERCIALISM 49 

Action, manual work, Tolstoy's " bread- work," are 
not nobler than the practice of art, science, and govern- 
ment. Tolstoy was right in insisting that morally and 
intellectually we need to use our muscles as well as 
our minds, wrong in supposing that his own noble 
scheme of life is ordained for all. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE GLORY OF RAW MATERIAL 

The material side of life may be enjoyed, scorned, 
endured, investigated, or ignored. We may wallow in 
it luxuriously. We may try to forget it and live 
above it. We may bear with it (sullenly or stoically) 
as the coal-heaver does. We may turn it into physics 
and chemistry. We may not notice it at all. These 
five ways of behavior towards the cruder facts of life 
are familiar enough to all. We all know sensualists, 
idealists, day-laborers, and scientists, — besides many 
who are not concerned in any way with our present 
problems. 

But I am especially interested in another type, one 
which has figured brilliantly in the writings of Charles 
Ferguson and Gerald Stanley Lee, yet is still too little 
appreciated. I mean the man who genuinely respects 
and even loves the material world, but is very silent 
about it. The objecjt of the present chapter is to de- 
scribe this man, and the world as he sees it. He be- 
longs in this section of my book, because he is not only 
a worker, but the typical worker of the present day, 
soaked with the spirit of work and therefore with re- 
spect for matter and with knowledge of its nature. He 
is incarnate in some of the best doctors, scientists, and 
business men of my acquaintance, but I shall begin 



THE GLORY OF RAW MATERIAL 51 

with his most superficial and forbidding aspect, the face 
that he turns, in self-defense, to an unsympathizing 
world. 

To match his mood of incessant industry there has 
grownup in him a certain " set " of the spiritual muscles. 
His mind is bent down and inward like the prehensile 
hands of the day-laborer. Outwardly he is stoical and 
grim, not because he is low-spirited, but because he 
wants to protest against sentimentalism and gush. He 
abhors a book like this because he is sick of all theoriz- 
ing. "Tall talk, but mighty little performance," is his 
favorite phrase of reproach. Vividly conscious of his 
own limitations and of the world's vast and dangerous 
power, he is like a burnt child who fears life's fires. 

Most of all, perhaps, he fears the flames of emotion, 
of love, worship, and hot faith. He sees fools hovering 
about those flames, eager, boastful, and reckless. He 
has his own type of enthusiasm, — well hidden beneath 
a stoical exterior, — but his work has taught him 
chiefly humility. Indeed, he is humble not only for 
himself, but for the whole race; too humble to expect 
progress, divinity, or immortality. Absolute assurance 
on all such matters has been knocked out of him by 
nature's stubborn resistance to his attack. He bows 
before the world with a shrug and a patient stoop. 

Silence is characteristic of the man whom I am 
describing, and therefore I am all the more eager to de- 
scribe him. He is taciturn, partly because he has little 
aptitude for words as a medium of exchange, partly 



52 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

because he never forgets Booker Washington's story 
of the Negro who found the cotton he was picking so 
"grassy" and the sun so powerful hot that he guessed 
he had a call to preach. People who give up work and 
turn to talking about socialism or religion, because 
talking is easier than working, excite in him a holy 
horror. The smooth drawing-room ideals which they 
teach so glibly are sure to end as they began, in talk. 
"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach," he says 
with scorn. 

I agree with much of this indictment. Idealism 
does often begin in talk the tasks that it never finishes 
in action. The discouragements encountered as we 
approach the later and harder places of an undertaking 
lead many of us to glide out of it and start a new one. 
Our devious and scrappy lives follow Chesterton's re- 
vised version of Longfellow : — 

"Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing, so I my life conduct. 
Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it chucked." 

Reformers love to talk and think, for in thought we can 
freely shape the early stages of great projects. But 
when we begin to carry them out, we get into regions 
not so malleable by thought, — regions full of obsta- 
cles that make us feel ignorant and helpless. 

Such obstacles the creative worker whom I am here 
describing has often fought and conquered. When he 
remembers the blood and sweat which he has expended 
in the struggle, he feels a deep respect for the enemy 
who made him work so hard, and deep disdain for those 



THE GLORY OF RAW MATERIAL 53 

who are always lisping out the beginnings of cam- 
paigns in high-sounding phrases, but never completing 
their sentence in action. A legislative campaign, for 
instance, often begins in eloquent and glorious discus- 
sion. That is easy and pleasant. But in its later compli- 
cations, among the quick thrusts and parries at close 
range, the glory goes out of it; it becomes sheer work. 
The fight to a finish is the best test of sincerity and 
strength. Then it is that contact with hard facts begins 
to knock the conceit out of us. 

For the pioneer whom I describe the world is colored 
by memories of many such fights. He thinks of it and 
attacks it as a mass of resistance, a huge and humbling 
opponent. The knots in lumber, the frost which spoils 
crops and orange trees, the aridity and barrenness 
of soils, earthquakes which devastate cities, fires that 
wipe out forests, are obstacles that make us respect the 
enemy and remember our littleness. But the pioneer 
whose praises I am now celebrating, the creative 
worker and subduer of nature, is merely humbled, not 
crushed, by his contact with the material world. Its 
crude, tough resistance nerves his spirit's leap. For 
matter is the sire of necessity, as necessity is the mother 
of invention. The defiance of unbridged streams and 
devastating disease kindles his fighting spirit to subdue 
them. They are whip and spur to his imagination. 
Inventiveness and valor are born of the contact. The 
lure of the unconquered, the threat of death and disas- 
ter, draw out of him resources of ingenuity which could 



54 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

never have been born unaided. The shock of raw 
nature's adventures and incalculable chances string 
him taut like a cold bath. He sees his work fronting 
him, and runs to meet it with fierce joy. 

He knows that he need not run far. He need not 
always be venturing into the wilderness. The raw ma- 
terial of creative work is close at hand. There is plenty 
of elemental resistance to be met in homely facts like 
the stupidity of school children, male voters, and un- 
enfranchised women, the recalcitrancy of old habits, 
the anarchy of warring elements within us, the resulting 
vice and crime of cities, the resulting languor and de- 
gradation of country districts. Plenty of virgin soil 
for cultivation here. Plenty of untrodden wastes to 
be explored. 

For the "material world" is not only outside us. It 
is inside us as well. We can recognize it everywhere by 
the familiar marks of crudity, resistance, disorder, and 
darkness. Rhapsodies about the universe may seem less 
poetical to conventional minds if we cross out the word 
" nature " wherever it occurs, and substitute "my body" 
or "my cross old aunt," or "my own stupidity." But 
there is poetry enough in all these tragic facts, and work 
enough, too. No one can deny that our own uncivilized 
impulses, organs, and relatives are part of nature and 
afford ample food for wonder, for ingenuity, and for 
taming the wild. We need not take ship for distant 
lands or hark back to savagery. There is chaos enough 
close at hand ; there is beauty enough also. 



THE GLORY OF RAW MATERIAL 55 

The pioneer is well aware of this. He begins at home 
and in the back yard. In his r61e of engineer he has 
been recently offering us advice in matters of health 
and education. He will not be confined to spanning 
deserts and torrents. He knows that the terror and 
havoc of raw nature oppress us just in proportion to 
our ignorance, our forgetfulness, and our dullness. 
These make volcanoes terrific, climates deadly, and 
soils sterile. These crowd our foreground with dull 
pupils, venal corporations, and applicants for divorce. 
So long as we are too stupid to conquer it, the material 
world is a perpetual menace to our false security. The 
best flowers of art, science, and virtue are always in 
danger while ignorance grumbles underground in vol- 
canic unrest. 

But is not this very danger a temptation to better 
work? Like a prophet, and in the spirit of Carlyle, the 
material world summons us to be up and doing. To 
defend our homes and our civilization we must fight 
the inroads of chaos upon our little trim corner of the 
cosmos. But we must also fight against our own self- 
satisfaction, and in this campaign the creative worker 
with bent back and stern face is still our leader. He 
teaches us to see our civilization as all too human and 
man-made. Fresh from contact with elemental forces, 
he finds our civilization reeking of our littleness as well 
as of our valiant endeavor. He finds it tame, academic, 
formal; for it repeats itself and every one's self. 

In contrast with all this smugness of so-called civili- 



56 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

zation, the creative worker sees nature as the vast store- 
house of the undiscovered. What is now "brute fact," 
crude matter, animal instinct, contains all the future 
possibilities of discovery and of creation. Reverence 
for the material is the recognition of this infinite re- 
sourcefulness on the part of nature, together with a 
manly welcome for the buffets which come to us in 
work, — "turn earth's smoothness rough," and shape 
our faculties to learn new truth. 

This reverence becomes love in those who realize 
that the material world provides what most of all their 
spirits crave: an outlet for the adventurous, the ro- 
mantic and heroic impulses. To set them afire, the 
initial check and friction of the elemental are just what 
is needed. 

Why have I linked the material side of existence with 
work rather than with play, love, or worship? Because 
play, love, and worship do not so often force us into 
humbling yet ultimately refreshing contact with what 
is crude. So long as it is play to shingle a roof, we do 
not notice the ache of our cramped legs, nor the strain 
upon our back muscles. When these elemental dis- 
comforts force themselves upon our notice, the shin- 
gling-game begins to feel like work. When love meets 
resistance, when it is thwarted by the screens of flesh, 
forgetfulness, distance, misunderstanding, and rivalry, 
it too begins to seem like work. It becomes a loyalty 
worth working for, or else a hateful and hopeless 
drudgery. 



THE GLCRY OF RAW MATERIAL 57 

Because this is so, — because work forces us to stare 
almost incessantly at the material world and gives us, 
despite its fascinations, so huge a slice of humble pie, 
— we are always in danger of biting off more than we 
can chew, imbibing more ugliness than we trans- 
form and assimilate. But that is a chance which we 
must take, all the more cheerfully because history has 
taught us that honest pessimism, and even honest 
atheism, bring about precious reforms in conventional 
religion, purifying it by revolt against its all too easy 
solution of the riddle of existence. If you become a 
" materialist" in the popular sense, you may arouse 
the dormant faith of your age, as the resistance of a 
tough wad adds force to the ignited powder behind it. 

Nevertheless our long bondage to the elemental 
and to earth is not always good for us. Our self-abase- 
ment in work may become barren and dreary because 
the work has become the extinguisher of the soul which 
it was meant decently to clothe. To be spiritually 
abased by work is virtue; to be spiritually squashed 
by work is failure. Common sense should teach us to 
take off the kettle when it boils, rather than humbly 
wait and be scalded when it spits. 

Of course I am speaking here not of the low-paid 
wage-earners who are often weighed down and blighted 
by the burdens of our industrial system. I am con- 
cerned here and throughout this chapter with the 
"pushing man," relatively well-to-do, strong, sound- 
sleeping, and of voracious appetite. His danger is to 



58 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

be squashed or scalded not by reason of poverty or 
overstrain, but because he does not raise his head from 
work to notice the ancient and beautiful world in 
which he lives. Industrial reform will not help him 
much. What he needs is common sense. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE RADIATIONS OF WORK 

The good intentions with which hell is paved are 
those that we offer as excuses for inaction, not the 
intentions which remain unfulfilled despite our best 
efforts to make them good. If you say, "No, I have 
not done anything this month, but I have had the 
best of intentions,'* you have condemned all the days 
which you describe. But if you say nothing about your 
intentions, make no apologies, but do your level best, 
then your unfulfilled intentions speak for you with 
the tongues of men and angels. Sincere intentions left 
unfulfilled despite our best efforts are perhaps the 
most valuable parts and the best fruits of character. 
In any action we may distinguish two parts : First, 
what the person himself knowingly and intentionally 
does. Second, and most valuable, the unconscious radi- 
ations which emanate from any one in full activity. 
These unconscious products, which are by far the best 
of our output, are like the quiet by-effects of a college, 
— what students get "just by rubbing against the walls 
of college buildings." Likewise unconscious are the 
best teachings of the mother who serves high ideals 
and intends to impart them to her children. She does 
not deliver just those goods, yet her intentions are not 
fruitless. The good which she does may issue in quite 



60 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

another direction from that which she planned, yet if 
she had not made that apparently futile plan, she would 
not have achieved her unconscious but beneficent in- 
fluence. 

This explains part of Luther's insistence that of him- 
self a man can do nothing, that his efforts are nil and 
God's grace all. A literal reading of this logic would 
make us give up trying, as some misguided teachers 
have advised. But the truth seems to be that we 
should give up expecting to accomplish anything just 
as we plan it, and should not be disappointed if 

"All we have hoped for and darkly have groped for ! 
Come not in the form that we prayed that it should." * 

Luther's insistence that no man can be "saved" 
(i.e., can accomplish anything that he really wants to 
accomplish) by "good works," and that works without 
faith are dross, can be justified if we are not too literal 
in our understanding of his terms. Your "works" are 
what you do self-consciously and with the effort to 
assume a virtue though you have it not. But your real 
success is not attained, your real merit is not limited, by 
the pitifully small results which you thus achieve. 
From the standpoint of achievement we are all fail- 
ures, although, as Stevenson says, we can be "faith- 
ful failures" and through faithfulness attain such suc- 
cess as we deserve. 

I want to exemplify the value of our unconscious 

. * From Gelett Burgess's stirring poem, "Here 's to the Cause." 



THE RADIATIONS OF WORK 61 

output in four different fields: in morals, in music, in 
business, and in science. 

. The unconscious radiations of moral ' ' example ' ' don't 
work when the man is trying to set an example. Char- 
acter talks when we are silent. A doctor wins confid- 
ence, not by what he says, but by his methods, what 
he takes for granted, his unconscious presence, the 
foundations of his certainty laid in years of hard work. 
For a similar reason the authority of Miss Jane Addams 
springs less from what she says than from what she 
has done, from the unconscious influence of her char- 
acter previously known to her audiences, and to the 
whole country. 

Tschaikowsky's * method of musical composition illus- 
trates the point, but here the unconscious radiations of 
work illumine first of all the worker himself, his better 
self, — lost to sight for the time being till the radiations 
search him out. Tschaikowsky found that his inspired 
self, the creator in him, often got lost and could be 
found only through the lantern of hard work, — a lan- 
tern so constructed that it threw no light behind it, 
no light on the plodding working self. He found that 
inspiration for composition often failed him wholly. 
For weeks at a time he could force out nothing that 
he valued. Yet if he waited patiently or impatiently 
for the inspiration, it did not come, for the kingdom 
of heaven and the inspirations of genius come not with 

1 M. I. Tchaikowsky, Life and Letters of Peter I. Tchaikowsky. 
John Lane, 1908. 



62 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

observation. He found that he must go to his desk 
each day and do something, the best he could, to 
get out some music. Then, in time, and quite unex- 
pectedly, rich musical ideas would come pouring into 
his head (whence, God only knows) faster than he 
could write them down. They were the unconscious 
radiations of his uninspired daily toil. 

Competent business men have told me that the best 
new ideas about their work come to them quite unex- 
pectedly, often on a holiday when their minds were not 
trying to evolve anything of the kind. Yet, if they 
take a permanent holiday no such inspirations come. 
In business or anywhere else the best fruit of work 
is, of course, originality. That is what brings money, 
fame, lasting usefulness, and it is what every worker 
wants to get out of his efforts. But all originality, all 
new ideas are miracles and come through us rather 
than of our own making. 

So it is that ideas come to us in science. "Any one 
who works hard," says Ostwald, the world-renowned 
physical chemist in his Natur philosophic "will find 
something new." But this "something" is usually 
found, accidentally as we say, while we are looking for 
something else. It is in this sense that genius results 
from taking infinite pains. It produces something never 
looked for, yet something which without the infinite 
pains could never have come to light. 

The heretical Scylla is to suppose that we are " jus- 
tified " by our works themselves, achieved with our own 



THE RADIATIONS OF WORK 63 

naked " self-made " hands. The heretical Charybdis 
is to suppose that because action is greater in its by- 
products than its intention, therefore action is useless. 
Religious tradition, artistic experience, the history of 
scientific discoveries, the natural history of personal 
influence in families, friendship, school-teaching, public 
life, the "best ideas" of the man of action, — all these 
lines of evidence converge to show that the flower of 
a man's work is that which he does not directly intend 
or deserve. His flashes of genius spring, — he knows 
not how, — like a flower from the deep root of his faith- 
ful labor. He labors in faith that some good not now 
seen or certain will somehow, somewhere come, if only 
he does his best. 

We are accustomed to think of "genius" mostly 
in the field of the fine arts, but I believe that all the 
unconscious by-products of faithful work are fashioned 
from the stuff of genius. Genius has its part in indus- 
trial invention, in scientific discoveries, in good jokes, 
in the happy grace of a skillful hostess. It plays through 
our disciplined natures to express the higher purposes 
of the race. Conscientious effort to win virtue or success 
by direct attack, is for most men the necessary precur- 
sor of genius, yet the effort itself is clumsy and amateur- 
ish. For all self-conscious effort to do better than one 
has hitherto done involves impersonation, as I shall 
try to explain more fully in "Play" (chapter xvn). 
We assume the virtue not yet possessed and try to 
play up to the character which we aspire to attain. 



64 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

Indeed, from one point of view this is the whole of 
morality. But in our highest moments, in all genius 
and heroism, whenever we are swept along by generous 
or aspiring impulse, impersonation and self-conscious- 
ness vanish. Somehow the deed is done, and as we 
look back we see that it springs out in the direction of 
our previous and painful efforts to do right. But it 
astonishes the doer almost as much as the beholder. 
Who can say that Shelley is wrong if he attributes his 
moments of genius to a Power who is greater than him- 
self, yet always at hand as answer to the prayer of 
utter sincerity? 



CHAPTER VIII 

WORK AND LOYALTY: THE IDEALIZATION OF WORK 

I was returning some years ago from a medical meet- 
ing in Washington, D.C., when I had the good fortune 
to overhear in the Pullman smoking-compartment a 
bit of conversation between the best-known doctor and 
the best-known lawyer in Boston. Both had been tak- 
ing a bit of vacation at the capital. Both were fierce, 
hungry workers; each loved his profession and led it. 

"I hope," said the doctor to the lawyer, "that you 
are coming back to your work with fresh enthusiasm.' ' 

The lawyer laughed and shrugged his shoulders, 
then puffed his cigar and looked out of the window with 
a grim smile. 

11 Because," went on the doctor, "you ought to set us 
all a good example and convert us to righteousness. 
I 'm coming back to my work with loathing." 

"What ! " says the novice, "don't they like their work 
after all ; if they do, why do they hate to come back 
to it?" Yes, that 's just the paradox which we must 
get used to, because it is a true reading of the facts. 
These men loved their calling as soon as they were in 
harness, yet when out of harness they sometimes sank 
into moods of revolt. 

"Out of harness!" There's a deal of significance in 
that trivial phrase. For all work is a yoke and a harness. 



66 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

We slip it off every night (or ought to) and many times 
we hate to slip it on again in the morning. We slip it 
off (or try to) when we get round to our Sundays and 
vacations. It is often hard to put it on again, all the 
harder sometimes if the vacation, the opera, the base- 
ball game, has relaxed our muscles and made us forget 
how to carry the burdens and responsibilities of our 
trade. 

This paradox, loving a task on the whole and yet 
hating it when we are "out of harness," must be a per- 
sonal experience to many of us as it is to me. I have 
loved my work intensely and for many years, yet I 
often feel an absolute repulsion for it when I Ve been 
"out of harness" a little while. I have all the anarchic 
caprices, irrational freaks, and dispirited morning lan- 
guors pictured by William James: "I know a person, 
for example, who will poke the fire, set chairs straight, 
pick dust-specks from the floor, arrange his table, 
snatch up the newspaper, take down any book which 
catches his eyes, trim his nails, waste the morning 
anyhow, in short, and all without premeditation, simply 
because the only thing he ought to attend to is the prep- 
aration of a lesson in formal logic which he detests. 
Anything but that!" 1 

Such a mood is not wholly devilish. If we look coolly 
at it, even while we are shaking it off, we shall see 
some sense in our revolt. Although a man ought to 
make a harness for himself and wear it, although only 

1 William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. I, p. 421. 



WORK AND LOYALTY 67 

that harness will enable him to support the responsi- 
bilities which I 've been celebrating, yet he should be 
able to see himself, sometimes, as a tiny ant, hurrying 
about to accomplish an ant's proportion of the world's 
work, but no more. Then his harness looks cheap and 
mean. 

And though our work and our science are symbolic, 
as I believe, of an eternal and glorious destiny, they are 
literally very inglorious and insignificant. Only their 
intention, only the vision that creates and sustains 
them, is great. Our work is the best we know, and in it 
as in a ship we have embarked with our treasures; but 
still it is human-made, and bears the impress of our 
limitations. Work seen literally is a misfit, and now 
and then our tired eyes see it so; then it looks like a 
curse. We should spurn it but for a voice within us 
which rebukes literalism and calls it a lie. That voice is 
loyalty. 

Loyalty is a force that holds a man to his job even 
in the moments when he hates it and sees no great 
significance in it. When this kind of blindness falls 
upon us, loyalty supplies a new method of guidance 
towards the substance of things not seen. Like all 
faith, it holds to the visible framework of daily labor 
by grim or by smiling determination. It bids us to 
be prompt at the office, to answer all letters at once, 
to look as brisk and interested as we can, till the mood 
passes and the familiar objects and occupations resume 
their halos. 



68 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

The modern world is so out of sympathy with the 
language and atmosphere of religion that it is hard for 
most people to recognize religion in work. Yet I am 
convinced that into our prosaic and practical details 
of business life we often unconsciously transfer that 
ancient power to "invest the world with its own di- 
vinity" which is the essence of faith, though not of 
prayer. The faith with which we hold to the routine of 
our calling through moods of discontent and disillu- 
sionment, is not altogether different from the faith that 
makes heroes, saints, and martyrs, and gives them 
vision of God and of immortality. 

William James has reminded us that we cannot fix 
attention on a point, because attention won't stay 
there: — 

"Try to attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or 
on the wall. You presently find that one or the other 
of two things has happened : either your vision has be- 
come blurred, so that you can see nothing distinct at 
all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the 
dot in question and are looking at something else. But 
if you ask yourself successive questions about the 
dot, — how big it is, how far, of what shape, what shade 
of color, etc., — in other words if you turn it over, if you 
think of it in various ways and along with various kinds 
of associates, — you can keep your mind on it for a 
comparatively long time." 1 

Your mind circles round the point, connects it with 
1 Talks to Teachers. 1909, p. 104. 



WORK AND LOYALTY 69 

other points (distant, past, or future, hypothetical 
and ideal variations, imaginary extensions or dimin- 
utions). As soon as ever you begin to think about 
anything, you begin to encircle it with a network of 
context. This context may be due to very arbitrary 
associations, sometimes harmless and neutral, some- 
times vicious and destructive. The wolfish old Tartar 
in Tolstoy's "Prisoner in the Caucasus" sees around 
the head of every innocent Russian the malignant faces 
of the Russian soldiers who once killed six of his seven 
sons and forced him to kill the seventh with his own 
hand. Though the face of a Russian may beam with 
kindness and childlike purity, that is lost to sight in the 
hovering cloud of memories which the old Tartar sees 
round any Russian. Justly because he is a Russian 
the old Tartar bristles and snarls at him in fury. Hate 
at first sight is thus as possible as love at first sight, 
if one sees about a personality so intense a cloud of 
hellish witnesses. 

Emotional life, whether of enthusiasm or intense dis- 
gust, depends largely upon clouds or penumbrse, which 
to a bystander may be quite invisible. Now and then 
a man gets down to Peter Bell's level, where 

"A primrose by the river's brim 
A yellow primrose was to him 
And it was nothing more." 

But most of us see above the primrose a cloud of associ- 
ations of some sort. The momentous question is ' ' What 
sort, and how far does it reach?" 



70 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

The best grade of penumbra is native, not imported. 
It belongs on him that wears it and is there discov- 
ered as well as created by the onlooker's faith. Its 
colors blend with the wearer's and are not in violent 
and unnatural contrast. When George Meredith's 
sentimental English youth fell out of love with Vittoria, 
the heroic Italian singer, because he detected a whiff 
of tobacco-smoke in her hair, he did what the old Tar- 
tar did, — forced down a wholly unnatural and unfit 
shadow upon an innocent creature's head. 

When, on the other hand, a man sees in his towering 
factory chimney the promise and potency of all the 
business that is coming to him with its help, when he 
sees rising from that chimney a vision of the position 
he is to hold, the influence he is to wield, the improve- 
ments he will make in the customs of his trade and in 
the politics of his town, — that sort of penumbra really 
fits. 

Such a net of associations clustering around a person- 
ality is made up of the things he stands for. Round a 
President's head we see the glories and the perils, the pol- 
icies and war-cries of the United States. Round a baby's 
head his mother sees the promise of his future. Crowned 
with this halo of future glory, the baby represents far 
more than he literally is. For the principle of halos is the 
principle of symbolism and of representation, whereby 
everything means more than it shows on the surface. 

There is nothing unusual or meritorious about halo- 
making. Everybody goes beyond surfaces to some 



WORK AND LOYALTY 71 

extent. But one of the most important of the differen- 
ces between man and man is in the extent and quality 
of this halo-making faculty. Three artists before the 
same landscape will paint it quite differently, not so 
much because their eyes are different as because their 
interests are different. Each of a group of financiers 
facing the same opportunity will see different possi- 
bilities in it. But how far do we go, how wide, how ac- 
cessible is the field of opportunity which we see in any 
business venture, any bit of untamed nature, any per- 
sonal or political situation? If you know that, you 
can measure the essential differences between great 
capacity and moderate or small capacity. 

The halo of origins, suggestions, and possibilities, 
about a person has, like all halos, a misty edge, growing 
dimmer as it recedes from its owner. More or less clearly 
we recognize that the halo has no definite end or mar- 
gin. If we are busy and " practical" (as we usually are) 
we are not much interested in this misty fact; we are 
soon engrossed in putting through the plans which are 
the most obvious hints from the halo. At any time, 
however, our chatter may be struck dumb, our sleepy 
heads may be shocked broad awake by a sudden con- 
sciousness of what this mistiness means. It means that 
if we could follow the whole of anybody's halo we should 
grasp the whole universe and its meaning. For every- 
body stands for the universe, and is a small edition of 
it, not in what he achieves but in what he means. 
Everybody's halo really stretches to infinity, though 



72 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

our eyesight does not. Hence we are always staring 
and blinking at the whole, though we can distinguish 
only a tiny fragment of it. 

No man who loves his work sees it without its halo; 
and because that halo really has no end, the love of 
work may at any moment take on a religious tinge. But 
whether or not we see this divinity in work, it is there, 
and we all live on its surface, upborne by it as by the 
solid earth. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE REWARDS OF WORK 

Payment can be given a workingman only for what 
some other man might have done, because the pay is 
fixed by estimate of "what the work is worth," i.e., 
what you can get other people to do it for. Hence 
you never pay any one for what he individually does, 
but for what "a man like him, — that wholly ficti- 
tious being, that supposedly fair specimen of his type 
and trade, — can be expected to do. 
X The man himself you cannot pay. Yet any one who 
does his work well, or gets satisfaction out of it, puts 
himself into it). Moreover, he does things that he can- 
not be given credit for, finishes parts that no one else 
will notice. Even a mediocre amateur musician knows 
that the best parts of his playing, his personal tributes 
to the genius of the composer whom he plays, are heard 
by no one but himself and "the God of things as they 
are." There might be bitterness in the thought that in 
our work we get paid or praised only for what is not 
particularly ours, while the work that we put our hearts 
into is not recognized or rewarded. But in the struggle 
for spiritual existence we adapt ourselves to the un- 
appreciative features of our environment and learn to 
look elsewhere for recognition. We do not expect people 
to pay us for our best. We look to the approval of 



74 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

conscience, to the light of our ideal seen more clearly 
when our work is good, or to the judgment of God /) 
Our terms differ more than our tendencies. The essen- 
tial point is that for appreciation of our best work we 
look to a Judge more just and keen-sighted than our 
paymaster. 

Nevertheless there is a spiritual value in being paid 
in hard cash. For though money is no measure of the 
individual value in work, it gives precious assurance 
of some value, some usefulness to people out of the 
worker's sight. Workers who do not need a money 
wage for the sake of anything that they can buy with 
it, still need it for its spiritual value. Doctors find this 
out when they try to get invalids or neurasthenics to 
work for the good of their health. Exercise done for 
exercise' sake is of very little value, even to the body, 
for half its purpose is to stimulate the will, and most 
wills refuse to rise at chest-weights and treadmills, 
however disguised. But our minds are still harder to 
fool with hygienic exercises done for the sake of keeping 
busy. To get any health or satisfaction out of work it 
must seem to the worker to be of some use. If he knows 
the market for raffia baskets is nil, and that he is merely 
being enticed into using his hands for the good of his 
muscles or of his soul, he soon gets a moral nausea at 
the whole attempt. 

This is the flaw in ideals of studiousness and self- 
culture. It is not enough that the self-culture shall seem 
good to President A. Lawrence Lowell or to some kind 



THE REWARDS OF WORK 75 

neurologist. The college boy himself, the psychoneu- 
rotic herself, must feel some zest along with the labor 
if it is to do any good. And this zest comes because 
they believe that by this bit of work they are " get- 
ting somewhere," winning some standing among those 
whose approval they desire, serving something or some- 
body besides the hired teacher or trainer. 1 

I once set a neurasthenic patient, formerly a stenog- 
rapher, to helping me with the clerical work in my office. 
She began to improve at once, because the rapid return 
of her former technical skill made her believe (after 
many months of idleness and gnawing worry about 
money) that some day she might get back to work. But 
what did her far more good was the check which I 
sent her at the end of her first week's work. She had 
not expected it, for she did not think her work good 
enough. But she knew me well enough to know that 
I had sworn off lying in all forms (even the most 
philanthropic and hygienic) and would not deceive her 
by pretending to value her work. The money was 
good for what it would buy ; it was even better because 
it proved to her the world's need for what she could do, 
and thus gave her a right to space and time upon the 
earth. 

1 At Arequipa, Dr. Philip King Brown's sanitarium for the tubercu- 
lous, near Fairfax, California, this principle is recognized and embodied. 
Dr. Brown has succeeded in curing patients because the pottery which 
his patients make is salable, as well as good in style and workmanship. 
Some of the patients need the money which their work earns, but they 
also need to feel their touch with the world outside. To make something 
which will sell gives them courage, self-respect. 



76 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

This is the spiritual value of pay. So far no one has 
thought of so convenient and convincing a way to 
wrap up and deliver at each citizen's door a parcel of 
courage for the future, and a morsel of self-respect which 
is food for the soul. 

Gratitude, given or received, is one of the best things 
in the world. We need far more of it and of far better 
quality. Yet I have never read any satisfactory account 
of what it so gloriously means. Its value begins just 
where the value of pay ends. Thanks are personal, and 
attempt to fit an adequate response to the particular 
service performed. ^ Pay is an impersonal coin which has 
been handed out to many before it reaches you, and 
will go to many others when it leaves you/ It is your 
right and you are not grateful for it. But thanks are a 
free gift and enrich the giver. ( There is no nobler art 
than the art of expressing one's gratitude in fresh, 
unhackneyed, unexaggerated terms which answer 
devotion with fresh devotion, fancy with new fancy, 
clarity with sincerity. Artists who get their reward 
only in money and in the stale plaudits of clapping 
hands are restless for something more individual. They 
want to be intimately understood and beautifully an- 
swered. For such gratitude they look to brother artists, 
to the few who really understand. There they find their 
best reward ; but even this leaves something wanting. 

Why is it so notoriously difficult to accept thanks? 
Most things that I am thanked for I am not conscious 



THE REWARDS OF WORK 77 

of having done at all. Obviously the thanks are mis- 
directed. Or, if I am conscious of having done what 
the thanker is grateful for, I am likewise conscious that 
I only handed on to a third person what had previously 
been given to me. I learned from Smith and then en- 
lightened Jones. Smith is the man to thank. Or again, 
one is thanked for simply carrying out a contract ; but 
one could not honorably do less. Thanks for going 
along the usual and necessary road seem gratuitous 
and undeserved. Or, finally, one receives gratitude 
for what one did with joy; that seems as queer as being 
thanked for eating one's dinner. 

But suppose that the deed one is thanked for was 
not an act of passing along what came originally from 
another, as you pass money in a street-car. Suppose a 
man has really originated something, an invention, 
a poem, a statue. He hardly claims it as his, for he 
does not know where it came from. He did not "make 
it up." It sprang into his mind, given to him as much 
as if he had received it from a friend. He does not feel 
that he is the one to receive thanks. The thanks should 
pass through him, as the gift did, to some one else, — 
to his parents who gave him and taught him so much, 
to his race, his nation, his health, his friends, his oppor- 
tunities. That is where it all came from ; that is where 
thanks are due. But each of these influences is itself 
the recipient of countless other influences. Every fact 
in the universe depends on every other fact. Ulti- 
mately, then, not he but the universe must be thanked. 



78 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

He deals with firms and employees, but he looks be- 
hind them, over their shoulders, and re-directs their 
thanks elsewhere, — ultimately, if he but knew it, to 
the World Spirit. One may not remember that Spirit. 
One often does not bother about the world's work. 
Thinking exhausts some people and fatally confuses 
others. But if one thinks at all, he runs up hard against 
the world plan, and finds it the bulkiest object in sight. 

The unsentimental male American as I have de- 
scribed him is almost morbidly apt to deride anything 
like gratitude, sentiment, or moralizing in relation to 
himself and his work. " No joy is mine ! " he would say ; 
"what do you take me for anyway, — a holy roller ?" 

He is just as quick to reject the idea that he cares 
about serving anybody or anything. He may admit 
that he wants to "make good" in a fair and square 
way, according to the rules of the game. But "service," 
like "joy," sounds too "stuck up" and Pharisaical 
for him. 

Nevertheless I firmly believe that his derision is 
only a ruse to conceal his morbid bashfulness and 
oafish sensitiveness. For in point of fact service is one 
of the things that pretty much everybody wants, 
however much he may disguise it and conceal it from 
himself. I have never seen any more unsentimental 
and raw-boned being than the American medical stu- 
dent ; yet he is simply hankering for service. Medical 
teachers spread before him banquets of tempting 



THE REWARDS OF WORK 79 

" opportunities," rare "cases," "beautiful" specimens, 
easy chances to distinguish himself in research and to 
absorb his medical food in predigested mouthfuls. He 
often remains indifferent. But the moment you give 
him a place to work in a clinic, to serve as Dr. Blank's 
fourteenth assistant in a hospital where good work is 
done, he will jump at the chance. The work is much 
harder and more monotonous than his regular studies. 
Much of it is not teaching him medicine. He has to go 
on doing Fehling's test for sugar and trying knee jerks 
long after he has learned the trick. He has to measure 
stomach contents, to weigh patients, to bandage legs, 
and to write down names and addresses in monotonous 
routine day after day. Yet he loves the work, and de- 
spite all the drudgery, he learns far more medicine by 
holding down an actual job of this kind than by lectures 
and classes. If you separate out the instructive por- ( 
tion of his day's work and present it to him without 
assigning him any regular position and duties, he does 
not like the work so well or learn so much. 

He is hungry for reality. Service as an assistant is 
reality. He knows that something genuine is occurring 
and that he plays a real part in it. He knows that he 
would be missed and that things would go wrong if he 
were not there. He senses a real need for him and feels 
it drawing him like a magnet. At the medical school 
his classes do not need him, though he is supposed to 
need them. Nothing would happen if he were not there. 
He feels ghostly and unreal like the lesson. For the 



80 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

lesson is a copy of reality; constantly it portrays an 
imaginary state of things: — 

"If you find a man unconscious, if you examine a 
tuberculous lung after death, if you give one half-grain 
of strychnin, if you wash out the stomach, such and 
such results will follow." Almost all medical teaching 
is thus blighted with unreality, mildewed with time. 
Laboratory work seems more real, but even laboratory 
work is usually artificial, a make-believe. You are not 
really analyzing medicines in search of possible adul- 
terants. Nobody wants your work. There is no tug of 
the world's need to which you respond. It is true that 
in laboratory instruction we give the student something 
more or less like the real conditions of life. We try to 
set him to work as if he were holding down a real job. 
But he knows that in fact he is only practicing for self- 
improvement, one of the flimsiest of the pretexts by 
which we try to call our a man's energies. 

Extraordinarily sound, those students' instincts! 
They are bored when we offer them opportunities to do 
what is easy and self -centered, but outside the current 
of reality. It is only when we give them hard, dry 
work like an assistantship in a clinic, a place where they 
can accomplish something that has a real value in the 
actual world, that they fall to with real appetite. 

The sense of somebody's need is, I believe, the most 
powerful motive in the world, one that appeals to the 
largest number of people of every age, race, and kind. 
It wakes up the whole nature, the powers that learn 



THE REWARDS OF WORK 81 

as well as those that perform ; it generates the vigor of 
interest that submerges selfishness and cowardice; it 
rouses the inventiveness and ingenuity that slumber 
so soundly in students' classrooms. For many of us, 
for more every time the world takes a step in the right 
direction, work that is service taps a great reservoir of 
power, sets free some of our caged and leashed energy. 

Pay, gratitude, and service, as ends of work, have 
each a value, though not of exactly the sort one might 
expect. How about success? Financial rewards are 
nowadays less talked about than the general prosperity 
which they express. Civic ideals are kept in the fore- 
ground alike by "boosters," real estate men, and cham- 
bers of commerce. According to these authorities busi- 
ness success means a flourishing city and a contented 
community. To help build up a fine city is what we are 
asked to do in case we take the investment offered us. 
A fine city is an efficiently-managed, well-lighted com- 
munity, with plenty of schools, parks, and churches. 
But stop a moment. What is the use of such a place? 
When we have built and finished this perfect city, with 
its smooth-running government, then at last its crime- 
freed, sanitary streets will be swept and garnished all 
ready to begin, — what? 

It is hard to hear any answer. Few are interested 
enough even to attempt one. For the interest of civic 
reform is mainly in the process — far less in the result. 



82 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

/ Boys who build a boat or a play-house usually find that 
there is far more fun in the process of building than in 
using the finished product. So it is with the reform of 
a slum or a municipal government. The best of it is in 
the reforming. We shall hardly stop to notice it when 
it is perfect. We shall take it for granted, as we do the 
safe delivery of the letters which we post, and be off on 
another campaign. Our civic goals are like the scented 
rushes in "Wool and Water/' The most beautiful 
ones Alice found were always those just beyond her 
reach. Perfect adaptation to environment, which 
seems to be what the sanitary and civic reformers aim 
at, would mean absolute stagnation, — attainment 
that buds no more. For what should stir us further? 

"Well, anyway, to reform our city is the best thing 
in sight. It is certainly in the right direction." Ah, 
then we know what the right direction is ! That is some- 
thing far more significant than any single step in civic 
progress. If we know the true direction, we can point 
beyond the civic models to something towards which 
they are on the road and get our satisfaction all along 
its course. 

The worship of ' ' the right direction ' ' is a fundamental 
motive in art and play as well as in work. Every noble 
game and work of art calls for others, incites to pil- 
grimages, reforms, and nobler arts. Art is not meant 
to give us something final ; everything in it is pointing 
ahead and getting its justification because it is "in the 
right direction." Everything in art, as in civics, gets 



THE REWARDS OF WORK 83 

the courage to exist and to push on because of its read- 
iness to be corrected by experience to a truer version 
of its own purpose. Sincere people want the true in 
their work as well as in their thinking. But the truth is 
an Infinite, and the will to approach it is an infinite in- 
tention. The fruit of this infinite intention would be our 
utter prostration of self before the vision. " Do with me 
as thou wilt." "Thy will not mine be done." 

I cannot see the end of all this. I see reform after 
reform of character and of civilization, progress after 
progress in science and art, rising like mountain ranges 
one behind the other. But there is no conceivable 
sense in all these upheavals if they are mere changes, 
mere uneasy shifts in the position of a dreaming world- 
spirit. To make sense they must be moving in a single 
direction fulfilling a single plan. 

It is obvious enough that all work is supposed to ful- 
fill some one's plan, — the worker's plan or his master's. 
It is good for something. But every one of the goods we 
buy with our work is itself a means to something else, 
a coin with which to purchase something more. The 
goods we supply, the clothes, food, transportation, 
medicine, knowledge, inspiration which we give, are 
themselves means to something else, perhaps to com- 
fort, health, education, courage. These again are means 
to better work, to civic perfection, to family happiness. 
But these once more are in themselves as worthless 
as fiat money or dolls stuffed with sawdust unless there 
is absolute value behind them. Happiness, civic per- 



84 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

fection, love, are sometimes named as the ultimate ends 
towards which the activities of busy men and women 
are means, but anybody who experiences any of these 
states and is not a Buddhist wallowing in vague bliss 
finds that they incite us to new deeds. If they are not 
soporific drugs, they are spurs to fresh action. 

Taken literally, the ideals of utility and civic reform 
are like the old myth which explained the world's sup- 
port as the broad back of an elephant. Who supports 
the elephant? He rests on a gigantic tortoise; and who 
supports the tortoise? No answer is audible in the busi- 
ness sections of our cities or in the schoolrooms or in 
the colleges. The church's answer is derided or ignored 
by a large fraction of us. But it is the right one ; and we 
shall learn to listen to it or pay the penalty. Govern- 
ment does not rest ultimately on the consent of the 
governed, but on their conformity to the will of the 
world-spirit which makes and unmakes civilizations. 

"Success" in industry, in art, or in love is saved 
from bitterness and disappointment because we re- 
gard our achievements far more symbolically than we 
know, and rest far more than we are aware upon the 
backing of God. 

Assuming that in every one there is an infinite and 
restless desire to get into the life of the world, — to 
share any and all life that is hot and urgent or cool and 
clear, — we can tackle this infinite task in two ways : — 

By trying to understand the universe in the samples 



THE REWARDS OF WORK 85 

of it which come into our ken and to draw from these 
bits a knowledge which typifies and represents the 
whole. That is science. 

By trying to serve. When we try to serve the world 
(or to understand it), we touch what is divine. We get 
our dignity, our courage, our joy in work because of 
the greatness of the far-off end always in sight, always 
attainable, never at any moment attained. Service is 
one of the ways by which a tiny insect like one of us 
can get a purchase on the whole universe. If we find 
the job where we can be of use, we are hitched to the 
star of the world, and move with it. 



PART II: PLAY 



CHAPTER X 

PLAYFULNESS, SERIOUSNESS, AND DULLNESS 

Why is it that everybody is taking play so seriously 
to-day? Our fathers considered it permissible within 
limits, something which we might indulge in, some- 
thing necessary, even, for young people in order that 
they might be the better prepared for work. "All 
work and no play," they used to say, " makes Jack 
a dull boy," — dull, of course, at his lessons which 
were supposedly the real object of his existence. But 
despite these admissions no one would have dreamed, 
a generation ago, of a National Playground Associa- 
tion, or of groups of sober adults taking counsel to- 
gether in prayerful spirit and with missionary zeal, 
to the end that they might spread abroad the gos- 
pel of play! To our fathers that would have sounded 
as blasphemous as a gospel of laxity, as absurd as a 
gospel of sweetmeats. 

Jack has been permitted (for motives of economy 
and of hygiene) to play, but this indulgent proverb 
was framed to excuse only the young. There is no hint 
that married women and professors, clergymen and 
bankers in business suits, are also prone to dullness, 
or worse, if they fail to frisk and gambol on the green. 
Yet here we are to-day, first broadening our idea of 
play till it spe ! ls recreation, then dreaming of public 



90 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

recreation as the birthright of all men, women, and 
children, — finally venturing, since Miss Addams's 
great book, " The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets/' 
to think of recreation as something holy. 

What is it that has come over us so swiftly and so 
silently? Can we deliberate about play, devote time, 
money, and brains to working it up, without losing our 
sense of humor and of proportion, — without stulti- 
fying ourselves? I hope to answer these questions with 
a " Yes " that has some ring to it. Would it might echo 
and pass on to you a deep and rallying note from the 
spirit of youth and from the city streets, both of which 
I love! 

Take first the question of playfulness in its relation 
to seriousness. Are they opposites? Need they sup- 
press each other? Shall we become a less serious people, 
a more flippant and trifling people, if we grow more 
playful? 

The answer is this: Seriousness is so fundamental a 
trend of the soul that it can accompany any of the 
soul's efforts. One can play seriously, as children, base- 
ball experts, and chess-players do. One can be both 
serious and funny : witness G. B. Shaw ( passim) , Lowell 
in the " Biglow Papers," and the fool in "Lear." Work, 
love, and even prayer can be either flippant or serious. 

But just because seriousness is universally accept- 
able as an ingredient, it tastes harsh and crude when 
we get it alone. Bare and unadorned seriousness is 



PLAY AND ITS ENEMIES 91 

indistinguishable from dullness. Like the sky, we al- 
ways want it as a background. But put it in the fore- 
ground, take away all else, and seriousness becomes a 
void or a mist quenching animation, vivacity, and 
effort. 

This should not surprise us, for seriousness is only 
one of many things which are essential as backgrounds, 
but disastrous as foregrounds. Any bodily function, 
breathing, for example, is another such background. It 
should rarely be suspended, but it should never ob- 
trude itself. Apoplectic old persons, whose breathing 
has become a serious and noisy business, try at least 
to conceal the fact as best they can. They do not pride 
themselves on their puffing and wheezing. Only when 
a man is near to death and has left behind him the 
powers and beauties which make him human, do we say, 
"Yes, he is still breathing." 

Seriousness simon-pure is a residual state into which 
' one relapses when one has nothing better to do or say. 
The preacher who cannot kindle us for righteousness, 
or summon us to repentance, or re-create in us some 
vision pi the living Christ, falls back on pure serious- 
k ness, that is on dullness. No impassioned speaker or- 
skillful fighter is ever thought of as " serious." We take 
his seriousness for granted like his good intentions, be- 
cause it has flowered into something more vital. Seri- 
ous fess at the funeral of a stranger may be all that is 
left is, if we can feel no poignancy of grief, or triumph- 
ant ; ove, but see only the blackness of it all. For to be 



92 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

merely serious is to be as colorless as those somber 
trappings, which are so often a libel of the glorious 
dead. 

No less somber is the "serious" editorial, sermon, 
or essay written by one who cannot be crisp nor richly 
ornate nor smooth and musical, nor sarcastic nor pro- 
phetic nor minatory. Of course seriousness may and 
usually does underlie all these moods, but if we get 
down to the threadbare and colorless solemnity of the 
merely serious we reach the soporific. 

Sleep, indeed, is the blood brother and dearest friend 
of seriousness. 

"Yes, we are alway serious at breakfast," said a 
charming Canadian girl at an uproarious Californian 
breakfast- table in the summer of 1904. "I don't see 
how you can laugh so much in the morning. Grand- 
mamma sometimes smiles at breakfast, but then you 
see she gets up at half-past five." 

Seriousness is in itself no crime. Most of us pass 
through two zones of it daily, on our way to sleep at 
fit and back again in the morning. It is a natural 
phenomenon when the machinery of the mind is run- 
ning down, or not ytc in full play. But in Heaven's 
name let us make no virtue of it. Let us decently con- 
ceal it, like our yawns, for (with apologies to John Mil- 
ton) it is only a kind of "linked yawning long drawn 
out." fe 

Unfortunately for all such good resolutions, ^this 
form of sleepiness, unabashed and chronic, is adt to 



PLAY AND ITS ENEMIES 93 

invade every corner of the day. It will not be confined 
to the breakfast hour, nor to the mysterious and silent 
watches of the night, when the editorials of morning 
papers are written. What is this melancholy and crest- 
fallen line of persons, whom I see moving along Beacon 
Street or Commonwealth Avenue, towards the heart 
of the city, a little before nine, in the crisp and frosty 
morning? So mechanical and spiritless is their gait 
as they plod along that one might fancy them mem- 
bers of the sad, exploited proletariat, crushed by over- 
work, exhausted by want of sleep. In fact they are 
prosperous bankers and lawyers on their way to busi- 
ness, and the only trouble with them is that they have 
just lapsed into being serious and serious only. It has 
never occurred to them that walking can be anything 
better than a means of sober progression. Poetry in 
walking? Don't suggest that to practical men. They'll 
think you a dangerous character. 

Well ; demonstration is better than argument. Look 
at that four-year-old walking to his business at the 
same hour in the morning, and improvising rhythms 
not only with his legs, but with every animated 
muscle. His themes are suggested by the curbstone, 
the granolithic pavement, or the morning itself. He 
is not merely fooling. The serious intention of getting 
somewhere underlies all his skips and dances; he has 
on the whole a direction, but he is not merely progress- 
ing like most of us " serious" walkers. The rhythm of 
his steps is not like his elder's, a stern barbaric tom-tom, 



94 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

bare and monotonous. It is flexible and various; it 
becomes hopping staccato or sliding legato, as his mood 
demands. It is not bound to a single tempo, but, like 
the winds of the spirit, it is slow and lingering, or fast 
and furious. Could any picture be more moving, and 
yet more humiliating, to heavy adults? Surely some 
future "Golden Treasury of Moving Pictures" will 
contain a reproduction of that exquisite rhapsody 
called " Steps Taken While Crossing Harvard Bridge 
at School Time," by Lyve Chylde, Esq., — a truly 
moving lyric composed in his fifth year! 

But why is it that almost all the best pictures in 
that Golden Treasury of lyric motions, which each of 
us is compiling in his memory, are composed before the 
thirteenth year? Simply because the child is still alive 
and trailing clouds of poetry as he walks, while we 
"serious" adult walkers are half dead or half asleep. 
Our creative energies are domiciled elsewhere, like ab- 
sentee landlords, far from the tenements of our clay. 
Yet it is not always so. I have seen a man who, even 
under the responsibilities of the highest office in the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, kept his soul fresh 
and alive in his moving body. One of the pictures that 
I treasure in memory is the figure of Governor Roger 
Wolcott walking to the State House in the morning. 
He was magnificently alive and therefore creative. 
With every step he was composing triumphant martial 
music. I could almost hear the themes as I walked 
behind him. He little knew "what argument his gait 



PLAY AND ITS ENEMIES 95 

to his neighbor's creed had lent." Many others must 
be thanking him to-day, if not with their lips yet cer- 
tainly in their lives. For in his established maturity 
he radiated vigor and abundance like a happy child. 

I wonder how many of us now living can bear such 
a comparison? One I know who can: a doctor in Chi- 
cago whose American lineage stretches far back of the 
Mayflower, back of any pale-faced newcomer to this 
continent. I do not forget that as doctor and as civic 
leader he has put Chicago and the whole country 
deeply in his debt. But my memory picture of him 
(and yours if you know him, as you probably do) will 
live to inspire and rebuke us even when we forget 
Chicago and civics and medical ideals. For they are 
only part of life, while our friend F. is the very incar- 
nation of life as he moves in the city streets. He brings 
the open country with him and the untarnished free- 
dom of mountain air. You can learn both "the cause 
and the cure of civilization" if you will walk with him 
on Michigan Avenue; for nothing in modern civiliza- 
tion has cramped him, not even its "serious" clothes! 

What an incubus we (males) carry with us in the 
dull and solemn monotony of our clothes. They are 
serious as the school history of England used in " Alice 
in Wonderland," to dry the wet company about the 
pool of tears. "It's the dryest thing I know," said the 
Dodo. Our garments, we boast, are quiet, staid, and 
unobtrusive; yes, like the mien of the drooping horse 
in the treadmill ! But not because any one really likes 



96 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

them. It is simply because we are too stupefied by 
custom, too much cowed by the threat of fashion, to 
do otherwise than as our neighbors do. Who can blame 
us? To put a feather in our cap might lose us our job, 
and there are many better causes for self-sacrifice than 
dress reform. But let us never again insult children or 
childlike races by inviting them to step up to our level 
and become as dull and ugly as we are in our gait, our 
dress, and our behavior. Let us clearly recognize that 
we have stepped down to a lower level when we gave up 
playfulness and adopted the merely serious carriage and 
the "quiet" clothes of the modern civilized adult. 

Let us cease to blaspheme against the spirit of eter- 
nal youth by supposing (as Karl Groos 1 does) that Play 
means chiefly a preparation for the " serious" work of 
life. Whatever has seriousness as its dominant note is 
a senile degeneration, a sad relapse from the healthy, 
adventurous playfulness of childhood. 

Worst of all, perhaps, is our habit of associating 
morality with a drab and bleak solemnity. Why should 
we confuse morality, the stuff of which heroes are made, 
with the dead-and-alive tissues of seriousness? Perhaps 
it may be as Joseph Lee surmises that the grim " prac- 
tical" determination, which we have come to associate 
with Puritanism and " morality," was originally an 
armor-of-proof which we put on temporarily for battle 
against the Cavaliers, and then in a fit of absent- 
mindedness forgot to take off, like a tired man who 
b » The Play of Man, pp. 2, 168, and passim. D. Appleton & Co., 1908. 



PLAY AND ITS ENEMIES 97 

drops asleep with his boots on. Perhaps there was 
once real use in the stiff, ugly armor miscalled serious- 
ness. Perhaps it served to scare the enemy or to di- 
minish the appetite for everything but battle, and so 
save costly supplies. 

Our present business, in any case, is to divorce 
morality from dullness. God never put them together. 
If in the past, for temporary and specific purposes, 
man has brought them together, it is now man's duty 
in the service of eternal ends to keep them apart. 
Would to Heaven this book might sever them once for 
all! 

We have begun to make the separation, else we never 
could have initiated to-day's revival of interest in play. 
In this interest we have come to recognize that moral- 
ity need not be dull, and what is more, that it must 
be sometimes playful. We are beginning to take play 
seriously as all children do, yet without forgetting 
that it is play and not work or worship. This brings 
us back to our starting-point both in this chapter 
and in life. We need not be afraid of taking play 
seriously so long as we distinguish seriousness from 
dullness. What is more enchanting than the serious- 
ness of child's play, — the " top-heavy solemnity " with 
which he applies himself to piling sand into a bucket 
and emptying it out again. Yet he is never dull, no 
matter how impressive his seriousness. It is the tired 
adult who is always prone to relapse into dullness in 
his gait, his talk, and his dress. 



CHAPTER XI 
PLAY, RECREATION, AND THE OTHER ARTS 

With the decline of the mistaken respect for mere "se- 
riousness" (which is either congenital dullness or sim- 
ple sleepiness exposed in public view) we are to-day 
cultivating play instead of merely permitting it. We 
want it recognized in schools (and ultimately in col- 
leges) as an essential part of the curriculum. Why 
should it be allowed to grow up like a weed outside the 
garden of childhood? Froebel knew better; he put 
play in the very center of that garden. To-day we see 
a long procession of educators, social workers, munic- 
ipalities, and churches tardily trailing behind Froebel, 
quite ignorant of the fact that he is their leader. But 
their direction is right. At last they are on the move, 
determined to put play where it belongs because they 
believe, with Stevenson, in the duty of happiness and 
in the destiny of man while serving his God "to enjoy 
Him forever.' ' We want to diminish the amount of 
submerged "busy" work and to expunge all desperate 
and hopeless work; we want to see fun and games 
playing through it, as heat lightning plays through 
heavy clouds. 

I will not be entangled at this point in any liaison 
with fascinating definitions. I know that one can de- 
fend a definition of work which will include all that I 



PLAY AND ART 99 

mean by play; but I think that it is more convenient 
to distinguish the two. I know a few rare people who 
can touch any dull job with a magic which turns it 
into sparkling play. I am quite aware that it is the 
spirit which we bring with us, not the necessities or laws 
of nature, which labels certain things "Work" and 
others "Play." Along comes a blithe and bird-like 
spirit, picks off all the work-labels from monotonous 
tasks (such as typewriting, book-keeping, and chart- 
making) , sticks play-labels upon them all and proceeds 
to make their new titles good. With such an example 
daily before my eyes, I am not likely to forget that 
radiant souls can change the gray of work to the golden- 
green of play. 

Mindful of this exhilarating fact, I nevertheless re- 
cognize that, for most of us, work and play often split 
apart and call for separate names. Fiddling is good, but 
not while Rome burns. Why not? Because fiddling, 
just at that juncture, may result in the abolition of all 
future fiddling through the combustion of fiddles, 
fiddlers, and their audiences. Nero, I suppose, retired 
to a safe distance before he began his historic perform- 
ance, but not all fiddlers can get away in time. Some- 
body must stay and put out the fire, which is work. 
We work in part because we must, in part because we 
have not got what we want and are divided into a rest- 
less or unsatisfied present and a yearned-for goal in the 
future. But in play we possess what we want. The ten- 
sion of present against future is released. Definitions, 



ioo WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

educators, and all of us, then, must recognize that play 
has a soul of its own and that Jesus played in the streets 
of his native town. 1 

We have ceased to think of play chiefly as an indul- 
gence, as a loosening of bonds, or even as a pleasure. We 
have begun to admire it not only as recreation, but as 
re-creation. That idea makes us open our eyes, for any- 
thing that can make us over anew calls out the respect 
even of a utility-ridden age like ours. Even our Puritan 
ancestors would have hastened to a healing spring if 
they had believed in it, and so we go tumbling over each 
other to learn recreation when we hear that it can renew 
our power to work. Great is the power of a hyphen! If 
play is not only recreation but re-creation, why then 
it is to be born again (a wholly orthodox procedure) 
and better born. It becomes a form of applied eu- 
genics. Perhaps after rebirth we may go back to our 
work with deeper-seeing eyes. We may even be less 
"stupid in the affections." Play recommends itself 
more highly when we see it from this point of view. We 
begin to think there may be something in it besides 
fooling. 

That mighty engine, the hyphen, which like some 
giant telescope has helped us to see new worlds, new 
freedom, spring-time and rejuvenation in the familiar 
word "recreation," can give it yet another glory. For 

1 " We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced ; we have mourned 
unto you and ye have not lamented." Matthew xi, 17. 



PLAY AND ART 101 

what is it that art, music, literature, drama d ) for us? 
Is it not the re-creating of jaded, humdrum V.ves? Art 
carries us off into a far country, more beautiful, more 
poignant, more tragic, perhaps more humorous and 
sparkling, perhaps nobler and more heroic, than is 
shown us in the workshop or the home. We emerge re- 
freshed by this intense experience, and for a few pre- 
cious minutes we look upon the world as if our eyes had 
never been dulled and stupefied by repetition and inat- 
tention, never lost the child's divine power of surprise. 

Art and play, then, fulfill the same function, provide 
us the same refreshment. Moreover, they are both their 
own excuse for being. In work, and to some extent in 
love, we are building for the future ; we are content to 
save, to sacrifice, and to repress, for the sake of a " far- 
off divine event." But in all art, including the variety 
called play, we anticipate heaven and attain immediate 
fruition: we give full rein to what strains against the 
leash. Subject to the rules of the game, or the rules 
of the art, we let our energies go at full gallop. We 
utter ourselves, like a schoolhouse turned inside out for 
recess. You know the sound ! 

Play and art, I believe, are essentially one; beauty 
lives in each, and though the beauty of athletics or of 
whist is not always quite obvious, it is no more obscure 
than the beauty of tragedy or of rhyme. Artificial they 
all are ; an outlet for the cramped human spirit they all 
furnish. 



102 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

Lucki.y for my present thesis, dancing has lately 
come so ouch to the fore that our minds are prepared 
for the transition from art to athletics and play. Any- 
body can see without an opera-glass that dancing is at 
once play, art, and athletics. So is baseball, though I 
fear that some of my readers have not been regular 
enough in their attendance upon the exhibitions of our 
greatest national art to thrill with recollection as I men- 
tion the exquisite beauty of the line-drive over short- 
stop, and the noble dignity of the curved throw from 
third to first. Nothing in the art of dancers like Isa- 
dora Duncan is more beautiful than the habitual mo- 
tions of ball-players as they throw, strike, catch, or 
slide. Of course beauty is not the whole of baseball nor 
of any art. There are also significance, heroism, sus- 
pense, response. Also there are serviceable materials, 
such as catgut, pigskin, horsehair, oil-paint, grease- 
paint, printer's ink, voices, muscles, whereby spiritual 
meanings are expressed and conveyed from the artists 
who create to us the "creative listeners' ' in the 
audience. 

We get fun and sometimes health from play and from 
some other arts ; but if any reader thinks that athletic 
games exist chiefly for the sake of fun, let him turn for 
a moment to another field of art and look over my 
shoulder at the face of the painter or musician while 
I inflict upon him that ancient painful congratulation : 
"What a pleasure it must be to you, Mr. Genius, to 
produce so much beauty." Now watch his effort to 



PLAY AND ART 103 

cover with a smile his pitying contempt for your green- 
horn's ignorance. " Pleasure? Yes, but at what a cost ! " 
Art is grinding hard work, much of the time; so is 
football ; and but for this arduous element, half its at- 
traction to the youth would be gone. He wants what is 
hard, adventurous, and therefore exhilarating. Things 
soft and easy, like listening to lectures, or passing 
college examinations, do not attract him. 

My thesis, then, is this : Play is at least one quarter 
of life and love another quarter, hence "conduct" in 
Matthew Arnold's sense cannot be three quarters of 
life. But play, the quarter which concerns us now, 
means recreation, and this is also the essential function 
of art. Play is one type or aspect of art, a fleeting, 
fragile improvisation in children oftentimes, a sternly 
disciplined construction in games like chess, football, or 
aviation. But like other arts it is at all times relatively 
complete in itself. It is not, like washing, gymnastics, 
or telephones, a means to life. It is life itself, striving 
quixotically for immediate perfection, breaking for a 
moment into perishable blossoms. 

It must be admitted that some of the noblest and 
wisest men in America still think of athletics chiefly 
as a means to health and morality. College presidents 
are wont to praise the sound body chiefly because they 
consider it a means to mental soundness. They think 
of athletics, and even of dancing, as a good method 
to build up the body and divert sexual energy from 



104 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

vicious outlets. That athletics and dancing may be 
means to these ends is true. It is also true that cows are 
a valuable means to leather boots and (I believe) to 
gum-drops; but I doubt if that is the end and aim of 
the cow's existence. Dancing strengthens the calves. 
" Nothing like dissection," said Bob Sawyer (you 
remember), "to give one an appetite." 

Violin-playing strengthens the fingers. But it is 
hardly worth while to remark that we don't play the 
violin for our health or for our finger-ends. Violin- 
playing also flattens, deforms, and callouses the finger- 
ends, but there are easier ways of obtaining these re- 
sults. The art is good despite these drawbacks. So 
football is good despite many injuries, not because it 
always improves health, but because it is a magnificent 
expression of the human spirit, a fine example of popu- 
lar art. 

We make a ridiculous fetish of health nowadays. 
Three of the very best things in life — heroism, artistic 
creation, and child-bearing — are often bad for the 
health. To avoid heroism, creative work, and child- 
bearing because they may injure the health, would 
show a conception of life no more warped and distorted 
than that which bids us dance and be merry because 
forsooth it is healthy to do so! As a rule, and in the 
long run, athletics and games probably promote that 
total enhancement of life, one aspect of which is health. 
But temporarily, and in some cases permanently, they 
leave their scars upon the body, though not such scars 



PLAY AND ART 105 

as are ploughed into mortals by the more strenuous 
and dangerous activities of helping to create a new 
machine, a new symphony, or a new child. 

Let us, therefore, give play, recreation, and the other 
popular arts their proper place beside the fine arts, and 
avoid the common error which degrades play to a medi- 
cal instrument. Thus we shall help to preserve the " fine 
arts" from dying of isolation. That is a real danger 
to-day. Chilled by our formal respect, discouraged by 
our practical neglect, mortified by our sentimental 
petting, the musician, sculptor, and painter are dan- 
gerously out of the current of vigorous American life. 
Or, to put it from the other side, American life is dan- 
gerously neglectful of some forms of art as well as of 
most forms of scholarship. The drama, baseball, and 
dancing are now the only popular arts of America to- 
day. Let us realize that they are nevertheless genuine 
arts, and plant them close beside music, literature, ( 
painting, and sculpture. Such a realization will help 
to keep vulgarity out of popular art, and to save the 
fine arts from degenerating into fastidiousness or dying 
of super-refinement. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE POPULAR ARTS, THE MINOR ARTS, AND THEIR 
BIG BROTHERS 

In the name of informality the guests at a large club 
dinner (with a presiding officer and speeches to follow) 
are sometimes left to seat themselves. Some sad and 
embarrassing moments follow. The presiding officer 
finds his chair of honor and there he stands alone, 
gazing wistfully at the rest of the company, as they 
place themselves at so respectful a distance from him 
that empty chairs, half a dozen or more on each side, 
are his only support. Respect for greatness turns out 
to mean the painful isolation of greatness, until at last 
some one takes pity on the unfortunate great or is rue- 
fully begged to move up and be neighborly. 

So it is with the "fine arts." A society should be 
formed to alleviate their cruel isolation. In the first 
place, more amateurs are needed. What would not our 
painters and sculptors give for such unfeigned interest, 
such discriminating approval and criticism as is daily 
shouted out by thousands of spectators to those happy 
and unconscious artists, the "Red Sox," the "Cubs," 
and the "Giants." A baseball audience is made up 
of enthusiastic amateurs, a considerable fraction of 
whom are confident that they "could have made that 
play far better." To get such audiences for ordinary 



MAJOR AND MINOR ARTS 107 

artists every one should be brought up to paint and to 
play some musical instrument, as all boys are brought 
up to play baseball. We know that very few of the 
children who learn writing in our schools will ever 
reach any greater literary distinction than the compo- 
sition of a good letter. But we do not, therefore, give 
up teaching them to write. Neither should we fail to 
teach children painting merely because we know that 
only one or two in a million will ever get beyond the 
pleasures and appreciations of the amateur. 

The Fine Arts are now treated as an aristocratic 
affair, an occupation for fastidious and delicate souls. 
So we think of them, so we treat them. Are we not 
brutally imposing these misconceptions upon the un- 
fortunate and struggling artist? Are we not forcing 
him to play a part that is utterly foreign to his nature? 
I think so. For art, I think, is as full-blooded and dash- 
ing a pursuit as fox-hunting or football. The artist dif- 
fers from you and me chiefly because he is more alive. 
He burns ; we smoulder. Everybody is slowly burning 
up in the fire of physiological metabolism. What we 
call "fire" is simply a bit of creation where the forces 
of life burn a little faster, a little hotter, and more beau- 
tifully than in human tissues. Were there more reali- 
zation of this among us there would be less "patroniz- 
ing" and more love of the fine arts, less listening and 
gazing, more practice. 

But there are many to plead the cause of Fine Arts, 
and the Popular Arts (baseball, dancing, and drama) 



1 08 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

need no amateur eulogist, since the magazines began 
to do them justice. My chief concern is with the 
minor arts, such as humor and good humor, and 
especially with some of the simplest among them, — 
speaking, gesticulating, letter-writing, seeing beauty 
in common things or putting it there, anticipating 
another's wish, threading one's way deftly in a crowded 
street, steering a discussion into profitable channels. 

The major games and the finer arts are arranged to 
fill up any space that may be left in or after a working 
day. They come at stated hours ; we leave our jobs and 
our homes to attend them. Doubtless this must always 
be so with the more heroic and permanent forms of 
art. We cannot play a football game on the hearthrug. 
We cannot carve statues while waiting on customers. 
But some of the humbler and less celebrated forms of 
art can penetrate every place and irradiate every 
hour. 

I mentioned just now a couple of the most important 
minor arts: humor; and good-humor, a form of good 
manners. Shining examples of both these arts are close 
round us in daily work, though we often ignore them. 
In 1 9 10, I knew a butcher dying of lingering disease 
who by his fun and radiant good humor kept at bay 
the specter of death, and in " the pleasant land of coun- 
terpane" maintained to the last a successful and happy 
life. When on my morning visit I would ask him to 
turn upon his side that I might examine his back, you 



MAJOR AND MINOR ARTS 109 

would fancy from his expression that I had invited a 
hungry man to eat. He could have answered with no 
more engaging alacrity if I had proffered him the 
chance to step back into health. He took pleasure and 
gave it in each of the trifling services rendered him in 
the hospital routine. He beamed and thanked me for 
shifting a pillow as if I had given him a diamond. He 
chuckled over my clumsy attempt to tilt the glass feed- 
ing-tube into his mouth without forcing him to raise his 
head; and each morning he smoothed and folded the 
flap of the top sheet like one performing an act of 
ritual. 

As we exchanged the most unpoetic information 
about his daily routine, the dull framework of question 
and answer was spangled over with a profusion of deli- 
cate, brilliant, meaningful looks that rose and flowered 
silently over his listening face, or leaped out of dull sen- 
tences like morning-glories on a trellis. So step by step 
as he went down the last gray week of his life, he taught 
me all unconsciously as many lessons about art, beauty, 
and playfulness as about heroism. 

One of his greatest and most naive arts, one of the 
best of all his good manners, was that million-hued 
miracle called a smile. I can recall but a tithe of the 
unspoken verses, the soundless improvisations of his 
smile, — serene, wistful, mischievous, deprecating, 
tender, joyful, welcoming. Not a moment of his ebbing 
life seemed prosaic or joyless, for each had in it the fore- 
taste or the aftertaste of a smile, born without effort 



no WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

and dying without pain; birth, fruition, and end, all 
equally beautiful. Sometimes at the beginning of our 
talk his face and eyes were silent, and only the lines 
of his eloquent hand spoke to me. Then, at some 
rousing recollection, there would break from his face 
a perfect chorus of meanings, each feature carrying 
its own strand of harmonious but varied melody. 

Well, I must stop talking about him and try to 
explain what he has to do with play and art. He exem- 
plifies two of the minor arts through which life may be 
enhanced and refreshed from moment to moment, 
whether marching up hill or down dale. It is said that 
the best crew is the one which gets its rest between 
every two strokes. So between every two strokes of 
effort we need the games and the arts to re-create us 
from moment to moment so that our souls shall never 
be prosaic or discouraged. Play and beauty, running 
like a gold thread through the warp and woof of our 
life-fabric, are surely as needful as the more concen- 
trated and exclusive recreations. To sing (or whistle) 
at one's work, to carry melodies and verses in our heads, 
to do things with a swing and a rhythm as some Japan- 
ese and all sailors do, is to preserve our souls from 
drouth. The games that we play with vocal intonations, 
the dramas we carry on with smile and glance and 
grimace, need not interrupt work. They call for no 
apparatus and no stage. Best of all, each of us "makes , 
the team" in these games; in these dramas each of us 
has "a speaking part." 



MAJOR AND MINOR ARTS in 

All these arts, major and minor, need, as I have al- 
ready intimated, more intimacy with one another. In 
them all there is beauty and renewal of the soul. There 
are fun and play in them all. A material basis is pre- 
supposed for them all. Health is an uncertain by- 
product in them all. Being thus congenial, they need 
one another. Popular arts and minor arts can win 
dignity and strength from closer association with 
fine arts. The latter will gain inspiration, dash, and 
effectiveness when they are freed from solitary con- 
finement and allowed to mingle about town with their 
less self-conscious fellow arts. 

Our generation ought to introduce these long-es- 
tranged brothers, each to each. We have made a be- 
ginning in the revival of pageantry and " folk-dancing." 
The pageant and the folk-dance have beauty, form, and 
technique like a fine art. Yet they are done in a playful 
spirit and by the general public, unversed in the fine 
arts, unconscious as ball-players. The special, secluded 
class of " artists" is suddenly merged in a crowd of de- 
lighted performers, who have all the better right to be 
called artists because they do not call themselves so. 
This is a good beginning. Further progress can be 
better charted out when we have considered in the 
coming chapters another group of minor arts. 



CHAPTER XIII 

JEWELS 

I have a prejudice against precious stones because 
they cost so much and can be enjoyed by so few. But 
suppose we strip away the coarser husks of people's 
enjoyment of them, especially the element of exclusive 
possession and the suggestion that their wearer is 
richer and therefore better than the rest of us. Suppose 
we isolate the peculiar beauty and power which jewels 
possess, do we not find that all can have it? What 
jewel sparkles like the glint of a low sun on the windows 
of a distant house, or like dewdrops on the grass, or 
like the opalescent snow-crystals seen when you look 
towards an afternoon sun across a fresh snow-field? 
Shift your position one inch and the whole amazing 
cluster of lights has changed to a new set. You see not 
one jewel, but hundreds; not one color only, but rose, 
green, and violet sown across the white snow in tiny 
globes of fiery light which make the "precious " stones 
seem dull by comparison. 

What more would you get if you could pick them off 
the snow, keep them, and call them yours? Do the 
jewels that you buy ever again look so marvelous to 
you as they did when first you handled them on the 
jeweler's velvet? One may clench his teeth and shut his 
fists and swear that he will not let himself "get so used " 



JEWELS 113 

to the beauty of things that he hardly notices them. 
To some extent one may succeed by various devices in 
postponing or diminishing the depreciation of his own 
pleasure in his property. But nothing can prevent it. 

One need not try to prove that possession is pure evil 
or that familiarity steals all that we care for. Doubt- 
less possession has its counterbalancing advantages. 
But, on the other hand, I cannot doubt that there are 
great and certain advantages in the jewels which we 
cannot keep. " Verweile dock; du hist so schoti," is al- 
ways a risky thing to say to one's experiences. The very 
brevity and fugitiveness of their flash may be needed 
to "stab our spirits broad awake"; a longer, slower 
illumination may not arouse us at all. Slow down a 
sparkling scherzo by Tschaikowsky or Chopin till each 
note stays with us a minute instead of a tenth of a 
second. It is ruined, of course, but its ruin is not more 
complete than the dilapidation of our possessions, stone 
by stone, as appreciation is undermined by the stealthy 
seeping waters of time. 

Of course we can and must fight against this ineradi- 
cable, original sin of satiety, — original sin because it 
is one in which even the most saintly and heroic share. 
Great souls keep it under, but no one wipes it out. Yet 
it is not " original" in the sense of being inborn. Chil- 
dren are marvelously free from it. 

Because we cannot preserve intact, as children do, 
this virgin freshness of the often repeated, we need 
especially to cultivate the minor art of seeing jewels, of 



H4 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

expecting the unexpected and absorbing its full im- 
pression, so that on the canvas of later memory it will 
shine like a high light. 

Perhaps I should here explain more concretely what 
I mean by the jewels of daily life. Here are some: 
the flash of a moving violin bow (as well as of the note 
it invokes), the shock of cool water on your heated face, 
a thrush note at dawn, a cadenza of swift laughter, the 
crash and foam of a breaking wave, the silver needle 
of a fife note, the rocket flight of a piccolo flute, all fire- 
works and brilliant lights in city streets, the light of 
speaking or laughing eyes, the first glimpse of an hepat- 
ica in spring with the white ends of its stamens shin- 
ing against its deep purple cup like stars in a summer 
night, — all these brilliant points of delight have this 
in common that, like an electric spark, they set off 
trains of thought and action which of ourselves we are 
powerless to ignite. 

Down through the stratified layers of our inheritance 
deep into the geologic ages of our souls the jewel's 
flash can penetrate, and from those black depths come 
up tiny but precious specimens of what were otherwise 
inaccessible. Ancient, fragmentary perceptions which 
no other power can exhume, leap to the surface of con- 
sciousness when I hear a thrush sing, and though I for- 
get them, they have had "their moment" and have 
acted on the whole texture and surface of my thoughts. 

Brief and limited though it is, — this game which 
we play with the jewel-like elements of perception, — 



JEWELS 115 

yet it possesses one of the typical merits of fine art: 
its intense and far-reaching suggestiveness. The con- 
centrated and profound significance of a jewel-like 
moment can sustain and nourish us through long 
stretches of Matthew Arnold's " conduct" and give 
edge and point to the dullest thinking. A shining mo- 
ment may center the meaning of a whole month, as a 
single cadence dominates the development of a whole 
symphony. 

Why should we not prize these ubiquitous jewels the 
more because they are accessible to all? They are more 
brilliant than rubies, less subject to the depreciation of 
familiarity, or fashion, and infinitely more various, 
since they can appeal to us through sound, touch, odor, 
and taste as well as through the vibrations of light. 
That possession of them costs nothing and excludes no 
one is surely a reason for valuing them still more highly. 
No one wants to be selfish. It is hard for any one to 
appropriate money or delight for the lack of which we 
know that others may be hungry. On the other hand, 
the homage we pay to the neglected jewels of light, 
water, sound and fire, so far from dispossessing other 
people may enrich them ; for it may become contagious. 
Others may catch such enthusiasms without diminish- 
ing our stock. Our abundance cannot mean another's 
lack. 

They are democratic, then, these jewel-like experi- 
ences, — free to all, shareable by all, the privilege of 
each. Yet to those who prize (as I do) the virtues of 



n6 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

the monarchical state and want to see them somehow 
persist in the amber of democracy, it is comforting to 
observe that in its own kingdom every jewel is an abso- 
lute monarch. A high light is annulled if copies of it 
are peppered across a picture. Like every climax, it 
makes our pulses throb and our imaginations leap just 
because it is a monarch on its throne, honored by de- 
pendents and subordinates around it. Its virtues, like 
those of monarchy, are communicated to all parts of 
the picture, but the less luminous tones have no equal- 
ity or fraternity in relation to the high light. Their 
virtue is in their subordination. 

This monarchical quality of jewel-like moments 
gives them power over long spaces of time. They live 
in their afterglow and in the thought and action which 
they touch off. We mourn their brevity, their intense 
but fugitive energy, as mothers repine because their 
children will not stay young; but in truth we do not 
want them prolonged any more than we want quick 
music slowed down, or a smile that is put on to stay. 

What is the peculiar value of the minor art of finding 
jewels? In the first place, any one can practice it. 
There is no lack of such sparkling bits in any one's 
environment. Next, they are extraordinarily dynamic ; 
like high power explosives they can open up deep hidden 
strata of consciousness and unlock the springs of last- 
ing happiness. For they are in fact little bits of heaven 
which we see by anticipation, as children peek at the 
Christmas tree through the curtains. 



CHAPTER XIV 

GIVE-AND-TAKE IN THE MINOR ARTS AND 
ELSEWHERE 

Overlooked, ridden down, and left by the roadside, 
there lies a host of divinely simple arts and games. But 
though we must try to pick up and take home with us 
as many as we can, we need not crowd out thereby any 
of the regular occupants of our home. We can play 
these games and do our " useful" work (good luck to 
it !) at the same time. They may serve to brighten and 
tone up whole chapters of otherwise prosaic existence, 
and even when they are scarcely noticed they often give 
a sparkling surface to the world we are living in. They 
are various in a hundred ways, yet in essentials they 
are much the same. 

One of the essentials in the minor arts and games (as 
well aain the fine arts, in work, in love, and in worship) 
is "give-and-take," or initiative and response. In the 
major arts this fundamental may be so overlaid with 
technique and aestheticism that it needs to be speci- 
ally pointed out, but in the minor arts it stands out 
clear. Take, for example, one of the unnamed sports 
which I will christen as the game of " Getting a Mean- 
ing Across." 

We can easily learn to recover the child's delight in 
getting a meaning across and in receiving a return. All 



n8 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

boys, and some undegenerate elders, are fascinated 
by the technique of giving and taking a message by 
wig- wagging or with a Morse telegraphic key. The 
precise nature of the message is a minor point. For until 
we grow dulled and rusted we enjoy the art of getting 
any message to or from another. It is good fun to wig- 
wag any command, to send any words, no matter how 
dull or familiar, through the ticking key. 

Two things only we demand : there must be somebody 
watching at the other end, and the words which we send 
must mean something. No art for art's sake will do 
here. We are down to fundamentals. We are recogniz- 
ing and being recognized, ever sacred and mystic arts. 

So my dying patient, the butcher, turned with a hom- 
ing instinct in his last days to some of the least of these 
arts, and found happiness in the elemental, — yes, the 
sacramental, — " give-and-take " of speech. He still 
possessed that privilege which we hope is not withheld 
from any part of creation. If the soils, the flowers, and 
the animals get meaning across to each other, doubtless 
they enjoy the art as deeply as children do, or as adults 
who learn a new language by practicing it upon every 
foreigner. My dying friend enjoyed the miracle of com- 
munication no matter how simple and unoriginal was 
the matter conveyed. He spoke with a smile and an- 
swered with a smile, not only for politeness' sake, but 
because he enjoyed the give-and-take. 

Recognition — no matter of what — is always a 
surprise and an adventure, until our appreciation has 



THE ARTS OF GIVE-AND-TAKE 119 

died down into dull, senile gazing. Some one holds up 
his fingers and we delight to see a rabbit's head in the 
shadow on the wall. We were not told beforehand what 
we were to see. From among the shadows we plucked 
out that bit of clear meaning afresh and for ourselves. 
Therefore it has all the zest of a " find." It was not iso- 
lated, framed, labeled, or double-starred in a Baedeker. 
We are given the same privilege of discovery whenever 
we listen to the simplest word that falls from another's 
lips. Till it actually issues, any meaning is possible. 
The prophetic, the illuminating, word for which the 
world is hungering may leap forth. 

And it is not only from a noble soul, like my butcher's, 
that the miracle may be expected. " We may be talking 
with a peevish and garrulous sneak. We are watching 
the play of his paltry features, his evasive eyes and 
babbling lips. Suddenly the face begins to change and 
harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole 
face of clay becomes a common mouthpiece and the 
voice that comes forth is the voice of God uttering His 
everlasting soliloquy." 1 

So in the midst of a madman's chatter I have heard 
the awful word of Truth sounding through. I have 
heard a maniac expound a scheme to save my soul and 
yours, a scheme saner, more practicable, and far-seeing 
than any that I have ever heard. He is well now and 
venturing forth to put that plan in practice. It holds 
good now that the madness has left him, yet he never 

1 G. K. Chesterton, Life of Browning, p. 202. 



120 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

conceived it or uttered it till he was in the grip of in- 
sanity. 

But I am still more interested that we should recog- 
nize and cultivate the very primitive game of Recog- 
nition (called "see the point" or " catch the idea"), 
when nothing great or beautiful is specially to be looked 
for. You give a look, throw out an idea, hazard a guess. 
You take back an impression, a surprise, a delight. 
Tennis is a great game, even when it is played by duf- 
fers, and when you play the game of Recognition with 
any person, there need be no heroic wisdom on the one 
side nor impressive beauty on the other. You do not 
even need another person . You can play the game alone. 
For instance : — 

The hour is seven in the morning and, though it is 
summer and bright sunshine, you are still sleepy. But 
though your mind is not yet fully awake, something 
unexpectedly fires you into the ancient game of Recog- 
nition. 

"What is that thing over there?" 

With your ocular and pupillary muscles, with retina, 
brain and mind, you aim and fire. 

" Just there," you send your bullet. "I'll bet I know 
what it is." There is a moment of suspense. Yes, you 
have got it. It is as you thought; that wonderful and 
beneficent object is a toothbrush ! But in your new posi- 
tion the toothbrush sends something back to you. You 
have given ; now you take the return. You are forced to 
recognize something that you did not pursue or expect. 



THE ARTS OF GIVE-AND-TAKE 121 

" What 's this that I find upon my retina, left here like 
a foundling, just as I am starting upon another errand? 
Why, it is as beautiful as the rainbows over the Niagara 
mist and far more brightly colored. Surely no one has 
put an opal into the handle of that toothbrush." 

Then naming begins and the first flush of miracle 
fades, as we recognize that " this " is the "light of com- 
mon day" striking the glass handle of the toothbrush 
and broken into rainbow colors on the towel beneath. 
It is only the "hygienic glass-handled toothbrush" 
which you have recently purchased. But it has given 
you a glorious hunt, and though the quarry is now 
bagged and lifeless compared to what it was before you 
fired a leaden conclusion into it, you have still the 
hunter's golden memories to look back to. 

To take a message or send a message by the tele- 
graphic system which we call sight or speech, is a pleas- 
ant game to many children, many Italians, Negroes, 
French, in fact I suppose to pretty much all the na- 
tions except the sober "Anglo-Saxons," — a game 
endlessly flexible and variable, a sport of which one 
never tires. The "give-and-take" of sight (never 
"take" alone if intelligence is awake) has the excite- 
ment of battledore and shuttlecock. Nay, rather battle- 
dore and shuttlecock is fun because it apes language 
in the fullness and neatness of its give-and-take. 

Here I believe is one of the most searching tests of 
any game or art: Is it so various, so flexible, and yet 



122 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

so artistically limited, that there is room in it for many 
kinds of give-and-take, such as improvisation, surprise, 
adventure, clear success, and obvious failure? If so, 
it is a good game, a fine art. If not, it is sure to degener- 
ate into gambling, into technique and aestheticism, into 
nirvanesque vagueness, or into a simple bore. Let us 
follow this clue somewhat further. 

With each ball sent in, the baseball pitcher "gives" 
and the batter "takes," or leaves, an opportunity. 
Never before in the history of the world has precisely this 
chance been given or taken. Hence freedom and the 
stamp of individuality is in every play. But more than 
that, the roles are perpetually changing. If the batter 
hits the ball, it is his turn to give and the fielder's to 
take a chance. The peculiar greatness of baseball, com- 
pared with other games, is in the endless variety of 
opportunities given, taken, refused, or missed, and the 
innumerable ways in which one can give, take, or miss. 
Success and failure are clean-cut. There is no limbo 
between. 

In football, tennis, billiards, leap-frog, shooting, 
fishing, boxing, wrestling, fencing, chess, whist, hide- 
and-seek, — the fascinating variety of "gives" and 
"takes" is clear. But this is not so true of rowing, bi- 
cycling, sailing, swimming, skating, coasting, and track 
athletics, for it is now with inanimate antagonists that 
we engage. Oar and water hit or miss each other as we 
row, but it is not a very vital sort of conversation. 
Ice is still less various and responsive. When we come 



THE ARTS OF GIVE-AND-TAKE 123 

to track athletics, we must confess that the running- 
track and the ground from which the jumper "takes 
off" as he rises, can hardly be said to respond at all. 
It is because these sports are lacking in give-and-take 
that men rarely sprint or jump merely for the fun of it. 
Hence competition is left as the heart and soul of all 
track athletics and marks them thereby as inferior to 
games like baseball and whist which contain a back- 
and-forth element. There is mighty little fun in a mile 
run or a hammer- throw unless you win. It is hard work 
and soon grows monotonous. In other words, it is not 
the best sort of play. 

Oratory, if the audience and the orator are at their 
best, is a fine example of an art built up and adorned 
by give-and-take. The true orator does not merely 
spout a piece previously learned by heart. He answers 
the mood of his audience as dancers answer one an- 
other in their dance. Back and forth goes the impulse 
and the idea, — perhaps through spoken question or 
comment from the audience, oftener through responses 
swiftly written in the faces of the hearers and deftly 
read by the speaker. Ordinary lectures and sermons, 
on the other hand, suffer because of the passivity of 
the audience. It is all give and no take, all batting 
and no return of the ball. 

Not so is it with adventure. The give-and-take be- 
tween man and nature becomes a lively game of "ques- 
tion and answer" when we explore an old clock, a new 



124 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

country, an animal tissue, or a gas. Our search is no 
passive observation and record of what happens; it 
is a voyage of discovery. Sometimes we put a loose, 
open-minded question as in roaming, browsing, tramp- 
ing* "gypsying"; sometimes we plan a tight, narrow 
search for one thing only: "Is arsenic present or ab- 
sent in this wall-paper ? " But the essentials of give-and- 
take are always the same. First we shape a searching 
question which we cast out like bait or serve like a ten- 
nis-ball. Then comes the answer from nature, some- 
thing caught by the bait of your question, some return 
of your service. If we get no definite answer the search 
is a failure; it was not sufficiently well planned. Good 
exploring knows what it is after and shapes its plan so 
that it is sure to get an answer telling whether it has 
succeeded or failed. The explorer who seeks the Pole 
must know when he gets there ; if not he should stay at 
home. 

If there is a long interval between service and return, 
between question asked and answer received, we call 
this investigation "work," not "play." For example, 
it is bent and painful toil to count the red corpuscles of 
the blood ; for during the lengthy operation, the mind is 
suspended between the question : "Any anaemia here? " 
and the answer, "Yes" or "No." We touch no firm 
ground of interest on either side. The count is an ad- 
venture of the mind, but, as in many adventures, there 
is a stretch of desert to be plodded through. Much 
scientific work has this arduous, laborious character; 



THE ARTS OF GIVE-AND-TAKE 125 

it is far more work than play. But if the answers to our 
questions come in thick and fast, as they do when we 
explore a new acquaintance, a virgin forest, or an old 
house, then science becomes one of the best forms of 
the Great Game of Give-and-Take. 

Contrast the lack of this vital response in the pas- 
sive music-guzzling of languid matinee audiences. Art 
is there debased. Consider M. Des Esseintes of Huys- 
man's romance, with his concert of smells. 1 "By 
means of his vaporizer the room was filled with an 
essence skillfully compounded by an artist's hand and 
well deserving its name — ' Extract of the Flowering 
Plain.' . . . Having completed his background he 
breathed over it all a light spray of essences . . . such 
as powdered and painted ladies use and added a sus- 
picion of lilac." 

But what can he do about it all? What answer can 
he toss back? What thanks? No "inner imitative 
creation," no creative attention is possible. Unless 
he has the senses of a Helen Keller, he is more power- 
less and passive before his chorus of smells than 
before any other vivid experience. As hand answers 
hand in touch, so we can answer sound with sound, 
look with look, dance with dance, landscape with pic- 
ture or poem. But before a concert of smells we can 
only breathe and nod. It is pleasure, but nothing more. 
It is no game, no art. 

No art, I say, for the best of art is never in looking 

1 Quoted from Groos, The Play of Man, pp. 19-20. 



126 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

on; always in getting into the game. So in watching 
a jumper I have seen a dozen spectators, at the moment 
of his leap, quite unconsciously jerk up a leg till the 
foot was in position to enter a horse's stirrup. Each 
spectator was giving his mite of aid, and a very substan- 
tial aid it is, seeing that practically all the best jumping 
records are made with the help of an audience. In the 
cold, alone, men hardly ever jump or run their best. 

In listening to music or looking at pictures the same 
sort of aid and response must be given by audience to 
artist, if the art is to be fine art. This active aid is what 
Mr. SchaufBer has called so finely the art of "creative 
listening." 1 We follow the movement of music as 
spectators follow the flight of the tennis-ball in a match 
game, craning heads rhythmically to right and left, as 
if they had but a single neck. " Tone movement glides, 
turns, twists, hops, leaps, dances, bows, sways, climbs, 
quivers, blusters and storms — all with equal ease. To 
reproduce this in the physical world, a man would 
have to dash himself to pieces, or become imponder- 
able." 2 Yet when we listen to music we seem to per- 
form all these impossible feats (as we do in dreams) 
and thus give back to the player the response which he 
needs. We play up to his playing as subordinates sup- 
port a star. — "Look! I show you a hazy, level horizon 
over a hot desert," says the music. — "Aye, aye, sir," 
says the audience, and sees it. — "Now, it's rearing 

1 Robert H. Schauffler, The Musical Amateur, and Other Essays. 
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912. 

2 Kostlin, quoted by Groos, The Play of Man, p. 28. 



THE ARTS OF GIVE-AND-TAKE 127 

up against the sky like a drawbridge. — Fly up with it 
and over it. — Swoop down on the other side," comes 
the order, and with surprised alacrity we obey. 

Such a maneuver, initiated by music, carried out 
with free improvisations by the audience, is to be dis- 
tinguished from the simpler movements suggested by 
rhythm. To rhythm, the response of the audience, 
with nodding heads and tapping feet, is much easier 
and much more obvious. What is our response to the 
pitch and quality and intensity of musical tones? I do 
not know. It is one of the problems that I hope to see 
worked out. But we may rest assured, I think, that we 
respond in some way to all that we appreciate in art. 
We play over within us what is given us, reshaping 
and continuing the idea as we do in talk. This is the 
"inner imitative creation" of Souriot. 

To "play the game" of life is a phrase that is often 
on our lips. I think it should always include both serv- 
ing and taking the return whatever matter it may be, 
grave or trifling, that is sent over the net. Again and 
again in this chapter I have said or implied that play 
and art find something very fundamental or even sa- 
cred in the practice of "give-and-take." In "Work" I 
tried to suggest the same thing. Labor without return, 
abundance passively gulped down without labor, are 
degrading. To make labor worthy, service and return 
must occur within such a span as the imagination 
can bridge, else we have not work, but drudgery. I 
shall try to bring out the same vital responsiveness 



128 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

in every form of love and of worship which deserves 
respect. 

I suppose any one may be misled into quoting Scrip- 
ture in support of his fads and fancies. I hope I shall 
not do so, but I intend to take the risk, for I have long 
been impressed by the importance of the passages 
in which Christ emphasized the elemental and univer- 
sal significance of response : — 

"Ask and it shall be given you; Seek and ye shall 
find; Knock and it shall be opened unto you." 

"Take, eat, this is my body." 

"He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." 

In the crude ideals of justice ("an eye for an eye and 
a tooth for a tooth"), in the Christian idea of return- 
ing good for evil, in the marriage ceremony when vows 
and rings are given and received, in the communion 
service, in the funeral service, even in the service of 
baptism when the child is offered by its parents and 
received into the church and state as a gift of God, we 
find give-and-take wrought into some of our most 
sacred and time-honored institutions. If this is so in 
fundamentals, it seems to me only what we might ex- 
pect that responsiveness should be the keynote of good 
play and the criterion for distinguishing it from bad. 

Summing up my sketch of the minor arts I will men- 
tion some of their most characteristic advantages : — 
(i) Anybody can learn one or more of them and most 



THE ARTS OF GIVE-AND-TAKE 129 

people do so. They require no musical ear, no expensive 
training in Paris. They can be practiced at any time, 
even in the midst of work and love. 

(2) While the service of major arts may drain the 
artist dry and leave him no vitality for human inter- 
course, the minor arts (especially humor and good 
humor) are not so exacting. They exhaust no one ; they 
ease and sweeten our daily life with our fellows. This 
refreshment is all the more constant because the minor 
artist seldom finds his audience cold. He has a hun- 
dred appreciators (in America, at least) for every one 
who supports the major arts by his sympathy. Give- 
and-take flies fast and furious between every minor 
artist and his audience. 

(3) "Good nature" is a singularly rich and pregnant 
art. Did you ever think of its literal meaning, its head- 
long plunge to the sweet, sound core of a man? The 
" good-natured" man is easy to please and hard to 
sour, because of his supple readiness to play any minor 
art or game that is going on and to suggest one if no- 
body else offers to do so. Any minor art and any minor 
part suits him. He demands no leading r61es, no monu- 
ment of permanence. His ready smile is the symbol of 
all this ; it is the flag which he flies whenever a game is 
begun, an adventure launched, or a return taken. 



XV 



TRANCE IN PLAY 



At the height of our appreciation of beauty and play- 
there is a tendency to dreamy states of mind, and 
finally to trance. For Ecstasy is the goal and climax to 
which musician, painter, dancer, poet are leading us, 
and if we cling to that climax and try to prolong it, 
we may easily slide over into a sort of Nirvana where 
life is quenched. The beauty overpowers us. "Vedi 
Napoli e poi rnorir" 

Oriental music and dancing are directed straight at 
this goal. They are meant to produce an anticipation 
of Nirvana by quenching desire, thought, and all 
awareness of self. In Occidental art there is also much 
of this semi-hypnotic quality. Strongly marked and 
monotonous rhythms, with every little melody woven 
upon them, approach the confines of trance. One favors 
the hypnotic state or true sleep by listening to any 
monotonous regularly repeated sound : a ticking clock, 
a buzzing bell-hammer, a humming insect, the rhyth- 
mic clank of sleeping-car wheels. 

Music, dancing, and verse make use of this thought- 
quenching power, whenever a simple rhythm is al- 
lowed to become the dominating element, as in bar- 
baric music it always is. In a drum corps, on the other 
hand, the rhythm is broken; its staccato quality is in 



TRANCE IN PLAY 131 

itself arousing. It wakes us up, as irregular noises 
always tend to do. 

Now sleep is one thing and play another. Any play 
which tends to put us to sleep is a poor play, especially 
if it puts us partially asleep, drugging our intelligence 
like alcohol and leaving the rest of us awake but un- 
governed. Swinging, rocking, chewing gum, and any 
formless type of music, dance, or verse exemplify 
what I mean. Such plays are essentially formless. They 
have no beginning, middle, or end. They minimize 
variety. They are as circular as worry, returning again 
and again to the same point, and soon approach the 
mechanical " running on" of the machine. They leave 
us passive as the clay of the potter spinning upon its 
wheel after his shaping hand is withdrawn. 

At any moment one can break the trance and relieve 
the monotony of pure rhythm by weaving an improvisa- 
tion upon it. Boys seldom stay long in a swing without 
contriving " stunts" to put variety and adventure into 
the drowsy motion; but I have seen girls swing in- 
definitely without variation or check. Such formless 
plays are meant to kill time, — the Oriental ambition. 
They are like the endless rhythmic rocking of idiots, 
or the restless to-and-fro of caged animals. Human 
prisoners also have such spasms of aimless walking up 
and down their cells. It quiets the frantic mind. 

But in any life-giving play or art these shapeless and 
narcotizing waves of sound or motion meet their own 
type of control. There are rules of the game, conven- 



132 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

tions of the art, a climax, opportunities for originality 
and courage. Even the loosest nonsense-book, the 
roughest horse-play, obeys some unwritten code of 
laws. Despite the groping, sprawling outbursts of 
energy, it is still pointed towards a vaguely defined end. 

It is to be admitted that the utterly loose and form- 
less plays, like rocking, swinging, and gum-chewing, 
bring with them a fascination of their own. If we sur- 
render ourselves to them we may succeed in loosing 
ourselves. Then our finite sorrows as well as our hot 
ambitions are swallowed up. But such an empty in- 
finity devoid of meaning and activity is, for Christian 
people, and for any one not poisoned by opium or by 
the idea of Nirvana, a hell, not a heaven. 

We must admit, then, that every game has in it the 
seeds of degeneration. Like any fine art it can easily 
slide over into sensualism and fooling. There is truth 
in the reproach directed against art by the "practical" 
men and against play by the anti-kindergartners. 
The soft, pleasure-seeking, enervating effeminacy of the 
mere aesthete is a danger always threatening us both 
in the fine arts and in play. But any one who realizes 
this danger can give the alarm and call the police when 
he finds that a game, a song, or a dance is beginning 
to be dominated by the Infinite Void in the shape of 
slow rhythm. We must clearly recognize that every 
intense delight is a trap unless treated lightly, symbol- 
ically, or as a climax. Crystals are refreshing and re- 
juvenating if we glance at them and pass on. But 



TRANCE IN PLAY 133 

crystal-gazing is a disease which splits apart the united 
soul. 

"He who bends to himself a Joy 
Doth the winged life destroy. 
But he who kisses a Joy as it flies 
Lives in Eternity's sunrise." 

(Blake.) 

To bend the Joy to one's self, to cling to it, prolong 
it, imagine it extended to eternity, crushes out its life 
in satiety or in the coma of somnolent ease. 

"Move on" is the watchword of the Lord, obeyed 
in every live play and art, as it is in every animal tissue 
that holds off death by reincarnation. But this eternal 
and ever valid command meets in play and art an 
obstacle. 

"Got what I want," says Play. 

" Bound for death in trance if you stick there," is the 
answer. 

For what decent human being is so smug that he 
wants to remain as he is? Your vision of beauty and 
delight is a call to action. Intense emotion calls for 
intense and far-reaching action in response to the call 
note of beauty. In work we know this well enough. 
In art and play we are tempted to forget it, and try to 
snatch at heaven. For play is a little heaven, a symbol 
and foretaste of that closer hold on God which in wor- 
ship is still more nearly attained. 

To kill time and personality instead of using them 
is the defect of the trance-like types of arts and play. 



134 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

There is no proper response, novelty, and adventure 
in them, — no moving on from life to greater life, as 
there ought to be in work, play, love, and worship 
alike. Lacking response, any one of these four blessings 
will soothe us into passivity, and become at last a 
curse. When work deadens and enslaves us by its monot- 
ony, it is because it lacks either initiative or response. 
Slavery is all give, no take ; but the slave of business 
habits or office routine, the drudge who never sees the 
product of his own labor, gets no more response from 
earth or soul than the beast of burden. Pay is, indeed, 
a symbol of response; we take it in answer to our 
effort. But this symbol, like a dead religious rite, may 
become a mere form unless there is life or substance 
behind it. 

Play and art, then, like commerce, live by the inter- 
change of value. Barter is native to all games and all 
creative work. By the swapping of values, beauty as 
well as wealth is distributed. But if one tries to main- 
tain converse with the empty air or passively to breathe 
in the spirit of beauty, sleep or lethargy results. " You 
bet they do," said a "practical" man to me the other 
day; "and that's why artists are such a lot of sensual 
loafers. They howl against us commercial people, but 
in the clubs and wherever the fleshpots are, you '11 find 
the artists congregated like flies and not paying their 
debts either." 

To escape such reproaches the devotees of art or 
of sport must prove to us that he can recognize and 



TRANCE IN PLAY 135 

escape the dangers of trance and lethargy which lurk 
near his road. For his efforts must always aspire to 
be crowned with a moment of ecstasy and in ecstasy 
he will linger till it becomes lethargy, unless he has 
something of the Puritan or of the ascetic in him, some 
Brunhilde who beckons him on like Siegfried from 
present victory il zu neuen Thaten" 



CHAPTER XVI 

CHAOTIC PLAYS, DISJOINTED PLAYS, AND OTHERS 

Much of our physiological need for recreation is in 
truth not a need for rest, but for freer activity. We 
must bend and huddle over our work to get it done 
without mistakes; but the stoop leaves us cramped. 
We want to stretch. Self-control, which is essential in 
good work, results not merely in the guidance of some 
energies but the suspension of many more. The col- 
legian at his studies is far more conscious of a general 
repression than of any particular guidance. Some 
one is sitting on the lid of him; that is his chief im- 
pression. 

Now, in play, somebody gets off the lid and what- 
ever is beneath flies up, with all the stored energy of 
repression, — provided the cramp has not been too 
long continued. In time repression may produce such 
atrophy and flaccidity of our mental muscles that we 
are incapable of play. But if the great muscles of the 
soul, unused in ordinary work, have not degenerated, 
one of the greatest blessings of play is to unleash our 
straining energies. 

Watch a dog that has been tied up, yapping and 
springing to the limit of his chain, while his master is 
getting ready for a walk. This is what work means to 



GOOD AND BAD PLAY 137 

many. Then watch him when the chain is snapped off; 
how he rushes away ventre d terre, every particle of his 
energy flung into each bark and leap, as he tears hither 
and thither. He does not know or care what he is after. 
He knows only that he is free and that the whole of him 
is in action. Children just out of school explode with the 
same whole-hearted and formless glee. We say that 
the holiday spirit is in them. But anxious householders 
(with orchards or gardens near by) say that the devil 
is in them. For like the dog just unleashed, they will 
run over anything and anybody that happens to stand 
in the path of their rush. Respectable elderly people 
ruefully tolerate the destructive explosions of youthful 
energy, or lament the lack of application and dili- 
gence in the young people of to-day. It is hard for 
" grown-ups" to realize that application and diligence 
bring with them necessary evils, which it is one of 
the tasks of play to undo; hard to appreciate the 
wild onrush of youth's torrents. Spring torrents they 
certainly are, for they issue in destruction as well as 
beauty. 

Play has in it some of this torrential energy demand- 
ing relief. It wants to get out and it ought to get out. 
It is unhealthy and destructive for the human spirit 
to issue forth always in parsimonious driblets, as it 
must in work, never letting out its full force. Play bal- 
ances work because for children and childlike adults it 
is one of the most wholehearted things that they ever 
do, — almost as enfranchising as a sneeze. Birds sing 



138 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

and puppies bark not merely with their throats, but 
with their tails and with every intermediate bit of 
themselves. More of this freedom we all need; more to- 
tality flung into our days. Athletics provides glimpses 
of such an outlet to one, music to another, drunkenness, 
I suppose (for lack of a better), to a third; but no play 
can satisfy our hunger for total and sincere expression. 
Worship is the outlet which we really need. Play is a 
useful safety-valve, but the safety-valve is hardly more 
beautiful than the steam whistle. It lets off energy; 
but that is the best we can say of it. 

"Expense regardless of pleasure" is the formula for 
some of the worst forms of architecture, interior dec- 
oration, and dress. Expenditure of energy, careless of 
form, goal, or skill, is the formula for a good deal of 
bad play, — bad if it continues long enough to be called 
play at all. An occasional '^barbaric yawp," a brief 
"fit of the giggles," may give harmless relief; yet it is 
neither play nor sin. So moderate doses of horse-play 
in the right place and time do no harm; but prolonged, 
premeditated horse-play soon becomes as tiresome to 
the players as to the spectators. It is chaotic, and only 
the degenerate can take chaos in large doses, without 
a desire to force order into it. 

Besides the trance-like plays and the chaotic plays 
there is another low-grade variety which we may call 
the "scrappy " or " flashy " plays. Most of these games 
provide their own funerals, for they dissipate desire 



GOOD AND BAD PLAY 139 

without satisfying it; but some of them linger on in 
deserted corners because they are not challenged and 
killed out by better sports. If boys can think of nothing 
better to do, they will wander about, stare in an aim- 
less and vacant way at the doings of their elders, or 
tear things to bits, not from curiosity to know what is 
inside them, but from mere restlessness. Adults in the 
same mood twiddle their fingers, tap with their feet, 
and read miscellaneous newspaper items. Picking up 
cigarette stubs and teasing the "cop" are also scrappy 
games, yet redeemed to some extent because they con- 
tain a leaven of adventure which raises them above 
mere lumpishness. They soon lose their fascination, 
however, when boys get the chance and the brains for 
baseball, for scouting, or any play which calls for more 
originality, more accumulation of skill, and more team- 
work. 

Gambling, the king of bad plays, is both scrappy, 
— because no one can carry out a plan, — and passive 
or lethargic. You get your result, for gain or loss, 
without any proportionate effort. You open your 
mouth, shut your eyes, and take what comes. But what 
you give has no relation to what you take. There is no 
response and no progress. 

Just here, threatening to smash the thesis which I 
meant to maintain, comes the thought: But God treats 
us just this way now and then! He gives us friends, 
powers, delights, and also black losses that we have 
done nothing to deserve, and when we fail to live up to 



i 4 o WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

them he still gives and forgives again and again. The 
gambler, then, is the man who tries to play God's part, 
to scale the walls of heaven and act as Providence to 
himself. He disintegrates morally because it is not for 
us to decide when we are to have a perfectly unmerited 
gift or an unearned sorrow. 

A summary of the good and bad elements in play 
may help to pull this chapter together. In bad play we 
may find rhythm dominant and all other form sacri- 
ficed. Rules, limits, and finish are at the minimum. 
Dash, risks, construction, and originality are not en- 
couraged. Everything is bound, with the fetters of per- 
fect safety or of perfect fatalism. People can keep up 
a bad game indefinitely or fitfully without a tendency 
to rebound into work or constructive thought. Pas- 
sivity and receptivity are so completely in possession 
of us that there is little for the "actor" to do but to 
sit still until he becomes a mere spectator. Gambling, 
listening to lectures, gossip, swinging, rocking, chewing 
tobacco or gum, opium-smoking, and, in some people, 
cigarette-smoking, are amusements of the vicious type. 
They have no end or form. They leave you as passion- 
less and passive as the suburbanite reading his after- 
breakfast newspaper on the train to town. 

Good play is subject to rules; it has a clear-cut form 
and organization. It may use rhythm and repetition, 
but subordinates them to improvisation and adven- 
ture. It gives intense and varied delight, but in 



GOOD AND BAD PLAY 141 

such dynamic form that pleasure is ever quickly lost 
and found again. It is full of give-and-take, dramati- 
cally loses its life to find it, and ever seeks, asks, knocks 
at the door of the unexplored. Its house is full of sym- 
bols and empty of idols. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE GAME, OR ART, OF IMPERSONATION IN WORK, 
PLAY, AND LOVE 

Play is drenched with symbolism and ritual. Think 
of the mystical significance of being "it" in tag, or in 
hide-and-seek! A unique and invisible crown of dis- 
tinction descends suddenly upon a boy and he is "it." 
Just the tag, just the mystical laying-on of a hand, has 
transformed your harmless and undistinguished fellow 
into a bearer of destiny and danger. The responsibil- 
ity may fall upon any one, regardless of color, creed, or 
previous condition of servitude; but how swiftly it 
transforms one's every feature and movement! Uni- 
form and insignia of office are unnecessary because 
every one sees them in imagination. 

All play begins with such an impersonation. Every 
player assumes a part and if time permitted should be 
costumed. The lowly second hand at whist should cer- 
tainly have a costume to distinguish him from the dash- 
ing and original first hand, and the lordly, judicial 
third hand. But in whist, roles are exchanged so swiftly 
that no quartette of lightning-change artists could keep 
pace with them. The musician who throws himself 
into his music assumes in each piece a new character. 
An actor of extraordinary versatility, he thus assumes 
himself to be, and he fails if he cannot prevent us 



THE GAME _0F IMPERSONATION 143 

from recognizing his familiar personality sticking out 
through the monkish cowl of Bach, the Byronic cloak 
of Chopin, and the goat-skin mantle of Debussy. 

To paint, one must put off the spectacles of every 
day through which one perceives the literal and utili- 
tarian aspects of nature, and put on a mask which shuts 
away one 's ordinary features and senses. For to front 
nature as a painter is to be blind to the interests of the 
landowner, farmer, miner, or woodsman. 

This ever-present need of impersonation in play and 
art is closely bound up with their symbolism. For to use 
symbolism is to put a new personality into an object, 
while impersonation puts a new personality into one's 
self. A football loose in a broken field of players is the 
very incarnation of desire; it is only when the whistle 
blows for an intermission that the ball becomes as dead 
as the dirt beneath it. 

Moreover, though impersonation is perhaps more 
complete and successful in play than anywhere else, 
play enjoys no monopoly. Play-acting turns up in 
almost every department of life. We put on a char- 
acter in work, in love, and in every moral effort. In 
medical work, for instance, we assume at the start the 
r61e of medical student and try to play that sardonic 
part with success. Underneath the mask we still re- 
cognize ourselves as scatter-brained boys, but we do 
our best to forget this and to maintain the disguise. 
Next, in our hospital service, we don the white coat 
and the lofty airs of the house-officer, while still unused 



144 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

to being addressed as ' 'doctor" and feeling a bit of hum- 
bug in the title. Finally we graduate as full-fledged 
doctors and sit in an office waiting for patients. But 
there we are more than ever conscious of impersonat- 
ing some one woefully different from ourselves. We are 
cast for the part of the wise old physician. We who have 
been in scrapes half our lives! We, who are in terror 
that our ignorance may any day be unmasked, are set 
here to inspire others with confidence in our wisdom! 
For did not the professor tell us that the first essential 
for success is to "gain the confidence of your patient"? 
My ! what a fool that patient will be if he gives any such 
confidence ! 

I know that there is need of the art of impersonation 
in medical work, and I see no reason to believe that the 
budding lawyer, legislator, or plumber feels any more 
at home in his role. After many years the costume 
comes to fit better, and when our growth stops alto- 
gether we are wholly reconciled to our part and begin 
to take ourselves " seriously." In time we may even be 
persuaded (if we are dull and credulous) that we fill 
our parts well. But as long as there is any fresh sap 
flowing in us, we shall recognize the humor and the 
pathos of our attempt to be what our professional title 
proclaims us to be. A game it will always be, a game to 
play the best we can, to practice as hard and learn as 
thoroughly as our nature allows; but still a game. 

Thus art, play, and impersonation seep into every 
crack and crevice of the structure called work. Is it any 



THE GAME OF IMPERSONATION 145 

different in love and friendship? What man has not 
suffered from stage fright when set to impersonate that 
most august, yet most versatile and accomplished 
character, the husband? Nor is the role of a "friend" 
a much easier one to play. No friend feels friendly all 
the time ; yet he cannot tear off his wig and let out his 
raucous natural voice every time that he happens to 
feel less than amicable. Nor can he throw up his job 
whenever he feels sulky and envious of those who play 
the leading roles, such as lover, boss, or professor! 

What more exciting game, what more difficult art! 
It is not all play. Mighty hard work sometimes. But 
the spirit of play has come to aid the spirit of work. 
Effort and fruition, work and play, are interwoven as 
tightly as the strands in a carpet. 

One more word about the art of impersonation in 
relation to knowledge and to love. Sympathy is ad- 
mittedly a long step towards love. Sympathy with every 
product of creation is the desire of every one who wants 
to live intelligently in the world and not monkishly out- 
side it. There is no comprehension without sympathy, 
and sympathy means impersonation. Therefore, to be 
able to impersonate like an actor every scoundrel and 
simpleton, every wind of prejudice and current of 
politics, brings us to the limit of pure intelligence and to 
the threshold of love. How can we deal wisely with 
the simpleton, justly with the scoundrel, unless we 
learn to put ourselves, like an actor, in their places? 



146 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

This involves no danger of adopting permanently the 
characters that we impersonate. We can choose good 
from bad all the more clearly if we know them inti- 
mately, by true sympathy. To cultivate love sounds 
mawkish and unnatural, but to cultivate sympathy 
is a large part of liberal education. I can see no limit 
to the benefit of impersonative sympathy in a well- 
balanced mind. I have a friend who likes to imperson- 
ate a wave or a barn swallow. I am sure he gets closer 
than the rest of us to the life of waves and swallows 
because he loves to shape himself into their image. 
It is hard, I admit, for swift, locomotive Americans 
to impersonate (as Oriental mystics do) the rigid im- 
mobility of the tree or the smiling passivity of sunshine, 
but we must acknowledge our limitation. Only the 
narrowly anthropomorphic can be content to say, "I 
count nothing human as foreign to me." What about 
the non-human world? No doubt our nearest kith and 
kin should come first. Charity begins at home and 
impersonation, the servant and forerunner of charity, 
should naturally begin with the imitation of Christ. 
But when he told us to consider the lilies of the field, 
he did not invite us to look down upon them patron- 
izingly nor, at the other extreme, to worship their 
beauty. He meant us to divest ourselves of human 
prejudices and to recognize their superiority to us in 
certain traits, — worthy our respectful and sympa- 
thetic imitation. 

Impersonation, then, is an art much needed in order 



THE GAME OF IMPERSONATION 147 

to prepare and discipline our stiff-necked individuality 
for the love and the knowledge of all created beings. 

Impersonation includes the whole field of morality: 
" Be a brave girl and don't cry " ; " Behave like a gentle- 
man"; "Take a man's part in this fight." Such ex- 
hortations bid us assume a virtue if we have it not, and 
in assuming it to impersonate a better self. So long as 
we are growing, so long as we are divided within our- 
selves, striving to be or to become what as yet we are 
not (but ought to be), there is impersonation in our 
effort. 

Why, then, is a school of acting not the only school 
of morality? Because in learning to act we are trained 
to suppleness of impersonation ; we are taught to sym- 
pathize with any character so deeply that it becomes 
for the time ours. An actor should be able to imper- 
sonate a mean sneak or a cruel liar as sympathetically 
as he dons the hero's mantle. Carry this process to 
the limit and a man's native character could be dis- 
solved not developed, his moral vision dazzled not 
clarified, and his progress towards his own personal 
ideals nil. But of course the actor, even of the Salvini 
tradition, does not carry acting to the limit. He leads 
his own life and minds his own business both on the 
stage and off. In so doing he chooses, as we all do, the 
sort of personality (which means a mask) that shall be 
his. He is no longer impartial and pliant. He is himself. 

The sort of impersonation which is the whole of 



148 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

morality, and constitutes a large part of work, play, 
and love, differs from theatricality, first because each 
actor chooses the part which he thinks will best suit 
him and tries to stick to it (more or less successfully) 
until he sees a better. He is not at all ready to play the 
heavy old gentleman, the dastardly villain, or the dis- 
appointed lover. He claps the lid upon his sympathies 
when they run to self-pity. The professional actor 
must welcome the opportunity sympathetically to 
impersonate self-pity like any other characteristic. In 
life one does not practice the art of losing one's temper 
or beating one's wife, but on the stage these accom- 
plishments are strictly in the line of business. 

I have said that impersonation is the whole of moral- 
ity. The growing sapwood of our nature, all that is 
struggling against itself towards perfection, advance- 
ment, or skill, is perpetually passing in and out of the 
art of impersonation. All this? What, then, is left? 
Very little, it appears; for are we not to be ever press- 
ing forward towards the mark of our high calling? Does 
not all that is decent in us want to be up and growing 
more decent? Shall we not perpetually aspire, or at 
any rate "climb"? 

No. For the morality of impersonation and self- 
conquest is not the whole of life. At our worst we 
sink below impersonation ; but at our best we rise above 
it. There is no impersonation in heroism. A self-con- 
scious, theatrical hero is a contradiction in terms. 



THE GAME OF IMPERSONATION 149 

Either he is carried away by his impulse or he is no more 
heroic than you or I. Art, when it rises beyond talent 
to genius, is the product of a present self- surrender, 
though perhaps of a past self-conquest. Overwhelming 
grief is no impersonation. It is elementally sincere. 

On the other hand, innocence is not impersonation. 
Children pass through a period when there is no per- 
ceptible division of better against worse, no straining 
towards a future, no attempt to be other than they 
are. In this Bluthezeit they attain perfections which 
their elders never reach. Or, quite uncorrupted, they 
may commit acts which in an adult would be sin. 

Adults, I believe, occasionally lapse or escape into 
this innocence. "I never hear the word escape," says 
Emily Dickinson, " without a quicker blood, a sudden 
expectation, a flying attitude." In the vast majority 
of us, such passion to escape is simply a blunder or a 
bit of selfishness, and corrupts when it conquers. But 
it may be a flash of genius ; it may rush into musical or 
metrical composition. It may also be an irruption of 
the animal in us which wrecks lives around us, yet 
leaves us ourselves unscathed because there has been 
no yielding, nor any informing consciousness of what 
we are about. In one's self it is safe to assume that such 
passivity is always bad. But let us sometimes give 
others the benefit of the doubt. They may be feeble- 
minded. They may be innocent. 

Impersonation, then, is essentially playful. Yet it 
penetrates into every part of active life, plays its part 



150 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

in work, in love, and even in worship, which must 
be learned like everything else by throwing ourselves 
whole-heartedly into what seems at first strange. 
This means that the divisions named in the title of 
this book are not mutually independent. Like key, 
time, shading, and timbre in music, the four energies 
of which I am writing cannot be torn apart without 
wounds or death for all. In a book one can fix atten- 
tion on one at a time, but in life they constantly inter- 
act. The better the life, the more perfectly they answer 
one another, as I shall try to show in the final chapter. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE PENETRATION OF WORK BY PLAY AND THE 
MINOR ARTS 

I was watching the engineer of the train which I 
left at the terminus the other day, as he climbed down 
from his cab for a word or two with the conductor. In 
their talk you could see "work" and "play" swiftly 
alternating and interweaving as they do so often in 
American life. First there was a moment of work, — 
the exchange of serious professional information. Then 
I heard a reference to "the old man " (whoever he was) f 
and instantly fun began to roll about in their cheeks 
like a quid of tobacco. Feet and legs began to twitch, 
sketching suggestions of a cake-walk or a double- 
shuffle, while words were jerked out in snatches over 
their shoulders. Business flashed in again when a 
passing brakeman hooked his hand into the conductor's 
elbow and emitted a brief message. Their faces fell 
and stiffened for an instant, but relaxed again as the 
engineer pulled himself up the perpendicular cab-steps 
with a parting witticism. 

In America this leaven of humor is, I suppose, the 
commonest of the interpenetrating minor arts. As it 
plays through and around the dullest tasks, one wonders 
whether the solution of the problem of drudgery may 
not come in part through learning to get our work done 



152 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

as automatically and unconsciously as we perform the 
huge labor of breathing. Consciousness might mean- 
time be occupied with something better worth while. 
Many people whistle or sing as they work, and I think 
it is especially in the dullest jobs like housework and 
coal-heaving that I have heard them sing. 

The engineer and conductor whose skillful inter- 
weaving of work and play I tried just now to sketch, 
remind me of another dull job, irradiated by the beauty 
of art. To take tickets as one walks down the aisle of 
a railway car is ordinarily a very serious and mechan- 
ical process, dull work if not drudgery. I have occasion- 
ally seen it done with pleasure and grace by a chatty 
and amusing conductor, but the greatest triumph 
of art that I remember was the performance of M. 
on a suburban branch of the Boston and Albany Rail- 
road. For though he lacked the facilities of gossip and 
humor, he succeeded in making the dry act of surren- 
dering one's ticket a pleasure to every suburbanite who 
rode on that branch. 

The exquisite, deferential, and courtly was his line. 
He wore the regular conductor's uniform of dark-blue 
cloth and brass buttons, but he contrived to keep the 
blue so glossy and the brass so resplendent that his 
entrance quite lighted up the car. He had, as I have 
said, no conversational powers. Perhaps it was this lack 
which led him to the quaint but pleasant habit of carry- 
ing a rosebud, or some other flower, in his lips. It 
sounds expensive; perhaps he was a disguised mil- 



PLAY IN WORK 153 

lionaire and gathered the blossoms in his own green- 
house each day. Anyway, he carried the perfume and 
fresh beauty of somebody's greenhouse into those dingy 
cars every day throughout the winter that I rode with 
him. 

He took each ticket with a slight bow and just the 
ghost of a smile, but most characteristic of all was the 
reverential care with which he received the ticket, as 
if to express his sense of the great favor that you did 
him in surrendering it at all. He reminded me of the 
minister's gracious tenderness as he takes a baby from 
its mother to baptize it. 

With the reception of the ticket M.'s art ceased 
abruptly. He punched it like any other machine. 
Could he have done otherwise, I wonder? Could 
Cyrano de Bergerac have punched each ticket with 
spirit and originality? Is there an irreducible residue of 
pure, eternal drudgery? Surely not. You and I reach 
our limit. We are checked by something we cannot 
mould to the purpose of art, — something that re- 
mains hard work and nothing else. But then you and 
I cannot take tickets like M., nor make rhymes while 
we fence like Cyrano. We are still too serious and self- 
conscious ; but there are hopes for us yet with the Jews, 
Irish, and Italians pouring in to leaven our lump of 
Anglo-Saxondom. 



CHAPTER XIX 

BY-PRODUCTS OF PLAY: CONSECRATION OF PLAY 

The central value of play is apt to be obscured by 
over-emphasis upon its minor issues. Among these are 
health and disease, pleasure and honor, education and 
victory. 

Health as I have already said, sometimes results from 
some games and arts. Thus well-to-do girls on the 
whole probably get physical benefit from dancing par- 
ties, though the late hours and bad air go far to neutral- 
ize any benefit. Whist and chess, painting and music 
probably do us more harm than good physically, but 
no one abandons them, or ought to abandon them on 
that account. The net hygienic results of college foot- 
ball have been calculated differently by different ob- 
servers. I believe that they are good on the whole, 
though not in every team or in every member of any 
team. But even if the bad hygienic results overbal- 
anced the good (as I think they do in music), I should 
believe in the game just the same. Many a player looks 
back upon his football career and is glad of it for the 
sake of the game itself, though he bear the honorable 
scars of contest. 

Pleasure certainly bears an organic relation to play. 
Unless for money or some other extraneous reason, no 



REWARDS AND GOALS 155 

one, I suppose, pursues an art or game which is painful 
on the whole. On the other hand, many pleasurable 
acts — sucking candy, for instance — are not games 
or arts^' Pleasure is the sense of getting what we want, 
and play is one of the things which we want. Pleasure, 
therefore, accompanies it as it also accompanies wor- 
ship, the receipt of money, the process of going to 
sleep, and many other non-playful acts. It is a natural 
accompaniment of play, but not a mark by which to 
characterize it. 

The education of minds and muscles by play is of 
great value. It also helps to educate us towards self- 
control, originality, and many other good qualities. 
But education, like pleasure, must usually be forgot- 
ten if you are to attain it in play. If you think of your 
feet while dancing, you cannot dance. If you think 
of your educational gain or your pleasure-income while 
you are in the heat of play, you will miss both. For 
mental integrity — knitting up the divided mind — 
is essential to play. To throw one's self into a game, as 
good players do, is to forget one's self and all one's 
possible earnings. 

Victory is the part of play most often abnormally 
prominent in popular games. Of course nobody wants 
to fail in a game or anything else ; but when one loses 
one wants to be a good loser, and this art of being a 
good loser is half the battle both in good play and 
in good living. If it is a pure misery to lose (as it is 



156 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

in gambling), then the game or the player is debased. 
Furthermore, if the only satisfaction is in winning, all 
close games are misery until the result is known, and 
then they are over. This predominance of what we 
don't want would soon drive us into disgust with 
any game, if winning were its only point. That most 
boys like to play games, such as football and baseball, 
which are often close, that boys dislike one-sided games 
and weak opponents, proves that the desire to win is 
not the only motive nor the chief one. Yet the desire to 
win must be a factor, else the game is tasteless. 

In all good sport, then, we are in a paradoxical state 
of mind. We want to win, but we want still more to 
play the game according to the rules and against a 
tough antagonist. We want to win fairly and in a con- 
test that puts us on our mettle. To win easily is not 
much fun. To win by cheating leaves us aware that, 
in fact, we did not win at all.; Cheating is rife especially 
among two groups of players ; first, those who are play- 
ing for money (salaries, bets, or bribes) or who have 
lost their interest in the game itself; secondly, among 
beginners who have never acquired much fondness for 
it. Cheating is also common in all games with ill- 
defined rules, games such as horse-dealing and the man- 
ipulation of investments. 

Education towards good sport consists in the proper 
placing of the desire to win, a desire which is essentially 
the same in athletics, professional life, and moral as- 
piration. Walking, talking, eating, running after one's 



REWARDS AND GOALS 157 

hat, — every conceivable act wants to win its goal. 
The presence of a visible competitor is not essential. 
Winning and losing feel much the same whether there 
is a human competitor or not. For when you win you 
always defeat something (if not somebody). To be 
beaten by the waves when you are trying to swim the 
English Channel must feel very much the same as 
being beaten in the race with a man. The worst of the 
disaster is in losing, not in losing to somebody else. 
Unless you happen to hate your competitor, you do not 
care who gets the trade or the game which you lose. 
It is your own loss that hurts, because it is a blow to 
pride and self-respect, rather than because it deprives 
you of any tangible prize. In amateur athletics this 
point is usually obvious, though the social honors 
naturally paid to winners somewhat obscure the issue. 
Even these honors, however, show that the heart of 
the desire to win is a hunger for increased self-respect. 
The praise of others feeds our fundamental desire "to 
make good." 

* Moral aspiration is nothing else but this "desire to 
win" generalized. The moral aspirant, like the athlete, 
has to learn the spirit of fair play and good sport. His 
desire to win must be disciplined till it is a desire either 
to win under the rules of life's game or to take defeat 
in good part. You want an education, a chance to put 
your powers at the service of the public, an opportun- 
ity to know the people who will show you your limita- 



158 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

tions and tempt you beyond them. But you do not 
want these prizes unconditionally. You do not want 
education if you have to steal the money to get it. 
You will not take the money if that acceptance means 
crushing the life out of your family, draining their 
resources dry in order to push you ahead. If another 
member of your family can obviously do better with 
that education than you can, family affection will 
make you want your own defeat. That is only fair 
play. The popular prayer, L" May the best man win," is 
as appropriate for educational aspiration as it is for 
athletics. 

This prayer is the absolute and unconditional wish 
behind all the renunciations of good sport. When both 
teams before a football game heartily and uncondition- 
ally wish that the best team may win, they can both 
be sure (barring flukes) that they will get that wish ful- 
filled. So in a sense they all win, whatever happens. 
If accidents seriously interfere with the game, it ought 
to be played over, as in some cases it is. At any rate, 
fair play and the honest desire to prove which team is 
best, demand that the game shall be played over. 

Is it a bodiless abstraction, — this desire for a fair 
game, this chastened but mighty desire which can al- 
ways win its end? On the contrary, with mature play- 
ers (who are the best players) the desire for good sport 
may become as whole-hearted and natural as any bodily 
appetite. They get their satisfaction, as singers do, in 
the game itself, and they get it all the way along, not 



REWARDS AND GOALS 159 

simply in the triumphant termination of the games 
which they happen to win. Moreover, they are al- 
ways thinking of other games and in this sense "never 
know when they are beaten." They try to learn from 
each game (successful or unsuccessful) what will serve 
to win the next. Thus contests, like years or tennis 
games, get linked up in sets, and our losses in one guide 
us to the next. In view of what went wrong in the last, 
one plans for better success, or at any rate a game fight 
in the next. 

To lose a game or a political fight, without losing 
one's courage, is to feed on the invisible when visible 
food is taken away. Beaten in every obvious and literal 
sense, the undiscouraged loser falls back upon the inner 
life. He takes to his inner line of defenses, there to 
maintain the fight unbeaten and undismayed. The 
"lost cause" becomes idealized into something which 
no one can lose until he loses the courage to fight for 
it. No sensualist, no one who has not some sort of 
faith in the ultimate victory of the invisible right 
which he serves, can keep his courage in any defeat, 
great or small. 

On the other hand, no winner can avoid conceit and 
the pride which traditionally precedes a fall, if he takes 
his victory at its face value. The sympathy and ap- 
plause of the bystanders are rank poison to a winner 
who has not learned to discount them, to look away 
from them, and point his admirers to the value of com- 
rades, the wisdom of trainers, the good luck and good 



160 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

teamwork on which he has ridden to victory. Standing 
as the product, the representative, the symbol of all 
these great forces, he can take his victory without 
inner disaster. 

The good winner is apt to take victory lightly for 
still another reason. Like the good loser, he is always 
looking forward to another and greater contest. Now 
that he has topped a foothill, he sees the steeper ranges 
ahead. The very moment of victory over the last hill 
spreads out before him for the first time the arduous 
prospect of the one ahead. Victory, literal and un- 
abashed, means looking backward. The good winner 
looks backward too ; he is not blind to what he has won; 
for one ecstatic moment he tastes its full sweetness, but 
next instant he looks ahead and prepares for the 
harder contest. 

The consecration of play, the element of spiritual 
nobility which utilitarians and the unplayful cannot 
see in it, is the necessary result of faithfulness to an 
invisible ideal of good sport. To be a good winner and 
a good loser is a wholly spiritual desire. In the politi- 
cal battles of some Spanish-American republics, the 
winning party guzzles and tyrannizes ; the losing party 
revolts and tries to kill or banish the winning team. 
This means simply that there is no loyalty to the rules 
of the game. The desire to win is unconditional; the 
spoils of office are the only moving power and the only 
reward of the winner. The loser cherishes no hopes for 
his lost "cause," but sulks or storms. 



REWARDS AND GOALS 161 

But in good sport or good politics there emerges the 
paradox of self-government, the subordination of a 
self to a Self (good citizenship, lawful government, fair 
play) which lives on and deserves our best service 
whether we win or lose. In good sport neither success 
nor failure is taken at its face value. Victory is not 
purely sweet ; defeat has its compensations. The cause 
which you work for in athletics is rarely recognized, 
I suppose, as part of the service of God. But in honest 
politics (for which "good sport" is certainly the best 
training) most sincere enthusiasts believe themselves to 
be servants of "the people," and many aspire to find, 
through them, the will of God. Ask any one who has 
worked to uphold the standard of good sport and later 
has labored for good government, whether the two 
efforts do not call for the same spirit and exercise the 
same spiritual muscles. Not only leaders and prophets of 
sport, but all subordinate players who obey the rules of 
the game and learn to be good winners and good losers, 
are working to uphold the standards of good sport. 
They are practicing the art of taking victory and de- 
feat symbolically; they are living the spiritual life. 

I must digress at this point to explain more clearly 
what I mean by symbolism both in play and outside 
it. Most of us hear of symbols in algebra or in religion, 
but have no idea of meeting them in play. Yet to my 
mind play without symbolism is like music without 
notes or verse without words. 



162 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

A symbol is a representative, standing for something 
greater than itself. The golden balls stand for the pawn- 
broker, the striped suit for the convict, the cross for 
Christianity. Increasingly civilization rests on symbol- 
ism, as commerce rests on credit. Yet to the unin- 
formed, all symbols are meaningless. The savage may 
value an old newspaper more than a thousand-dollar 
bill, because the newspaper is larger. He takes the bill 
as literally as some people take death or birth, recog- 
nizing no larger value behind it. The bill is a bit of 
paper. To the savage it is nothing more, while to most 
of us it is hard to recall the time when we saw it merely 
as paper. 

The great value of symbols is that they enable us to 
handle or to express what would otherwise be too great 
for us. To carry a thousand dollars in silver or gold 
would make swift or nimble motions impossible and 
fatigue always imminent. To carry about and barter 
the goods which this thousand will purchase is quite 
impracticable. Hence money-symbols are short cuts 
and labor-saving devices. When word-symbols replace 
our earlier picture language, we save the time needed 
to draw and to understand the pictures. Further, 
people are enabled, by symbols as by the switching- 
towers in a railway yard, to plan and to execute much 
more complex, far-reaching, and accurate results. 

Whether in play, in speech, in currency, in religion, 
or in politics, symbols are precious because they con- 
vey a wealth of meaning in compact form. Despite 



REWARDS AND GOALS 163 

their convenience they are quite arbitrary and ridicu- 
lous to those who do not grasp them. So are the rules 
of a game, which limit the players' freedom and unite 
them despite their rivalry. These rules are as arbitrary 
as the designs on currency, and incapable, like currency, 
of giving us an immediate reward or tangible utility. 
"Hang the rules," we are all of us prone to say when 
they balk us of victory. Shall a few sentences, perhaps 
not even printed but only handed down by tradition, 
— shall these bodiless ideas stand in the way of our 
getting what we hotly want? Yes, they shall do just 
that, and we shall learn to submit to them as we submit 
to greater laws, national, moral, and divine. For every 
business man is tempted to " hang the rules " when they 
interfere with his profits, and every one of us longs to 
hang the moral law when it interferes with what we 
want to do. 

Respect for vital but intangible meaning behind a 
reasonable law, which baffles or defeats our will, is a 
training in the use of great symbols and so in the exer- 
cise of spiritual muscles. Respect for the same law 
when it brings us profit and success, means triumph in 
a yet more searching test, and exercises another set of 
spiritual muscles. 

Our moments of success or of defeat are not merely 
what they seem on the face of them. They stand as 
symbolic representatives of what the law and the in- 
visible powers of the world have put up to us. They 
are interpreted like words or coins by remembering 



1 64 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

what stands behind them, out of sight. For in success 
we recognize (or ought to) that without the protection 
of the law we should not have won. Chance or the crude 
strength of those opposed to us would have rolled us 
in the dust but for the law. In almost every sport 
there are moments when it is only by the rules that 
our opponents are prevented from running away with 
the game. In some of our great cities there are crimi- 
nal gangs which, but for the law and its enforcement, 
would break over us like a tidal wave. It is not by 
our own personal merits, but by the force of law and 
by the help of our fellows that we win free space for 
happiness and creation. Elemental nature, too, is kept 
at bay, not by what you and I do, but by the police 
protection of science which keeps us safe because we 
obey the laws of that great game. 

Play, then, is consecrated by its symbolism and the 
ideals of good sport which it embodies. But the es- 
sence of good sport, — obedience to rules, ability to be 
a modest winner and cheerful loser, — is also the es- 
sence of self-government, good service, and spiritual 
growth. 



PART III: LOVE 



CHAPTER XX 



THE ALLIES OF LOVE 



It seems hardly decent to discuss so sacred a matter 
in the publicity of print. Dimly aware of this, we 
try to approach the subject delicately through such 
phrases as "The Spirit of Youth" (Jane Addams) or 
"The Life Force" (G. Bernard Shaw in "Man and 
Superman"). To free the word "love" from its asso- 
ciation with boudoirs and morbid novels, we try to 
identify it with something genial and all-pervasive, to 
ally it with the great, sane forces of nature. For we 
believe that if these allies stimulate and reinforce per- 
sonality, if they awaken and intensify our feeble ener- 
gies, then they tend to ennoble our affections. 

Elemental nature is one such ally. A group of people 
who start on a camping trip tolerably indifferent to 
each other, will usually come home bubbling over with 
friendliness. There may have been very little talking 
during the entire trip. What has drawn them together? 
Is it not the close contact with elemental conditions 
in paddling, carrying, cooking, and sleeping by the 
camp-fire? To share fatigue, disappointment, surprise, 
hunger, and good appetite, gives people a common 
life. Facing nature they join hands, reinvigorated. 

Friends who went through the horrors of the San 



168 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

Francisco earthquake in 1906, and kept their spiritual 
senses alert, tell me that their most poignant experience 
was not one of horror or of pity, but of the almost 
miraculous attainment of human brotherhood. Dur- 
ing the days just after the disaster, when rich and poor 
waited in line together for their allowance of bread and 
milk, "I saw," says a friend, "a rich woman from the 
St. Francis Hotel lying asleep on a doorstep with her 
head on a muff. A long sable coat was thrown over 
her and under one corner of it a young Japanese boy 
was curled up asleep. . . . Everybody was everybody's 
friend, and though we were all dog-tired, there was not 
a word of complaint or ill-nature. ' ' To bivouac together 
in the park and take care of each other's babies around 
fires of driftwood gathered from the beach, made men 
and women once more defenseless children of the earth, 
revealed each to each in their innate and genuine love- 
ableness. Common danger and mutual helpfulness, 
common misfortune, common work, common confront- 
ation with the elemental, brought a swift achievement 
of almost ideal brotherhood. A crushing blow made 
all the world for a time kin. 

Within a few weeks, it is true, the San Franciscans 
forgot this beneficent revelation and slid back into their 
old animosities. Any other set of people would have 
done likewise. But even that pitiful relapse serves to 
make my present point the clearer. Affection, this time 
in the form of comradeship, was for a day reinforced, 
almost consecrated, by contact with hostile nature; 



THE ALLIES OF LOVE 169 

then lost its sacredness again, when the bond of con- 
tact was broken and "civilization" once more got the 
upper hand. 

In hospital work patients, doctors, and nurses, who 
face terror and disease together, are often knit into 
comradeship, like soldiers on a campaign. The "new 
patient" just entering a hospital is often forlorn and 
terror-stricken as a child lost in a forest or landed 
friendless in a strange country. The menace of illness, 
the hospital's dark and fearful suggestions, its sights 
and sounds and smells, make him hunger for friendly 
guidance. Hence it is marvelously easy to serve him as 
a friend in need. Through the simplest physical help- 
fulness or decent sympathy, one gains a foothold in 
friendship which could not be won in months of acquain- 
tance outside of the hospital. Why? Because disaster 
and sickness renew our instinctive alliance with any 
human being against the assaults of the non-human 
world. 

I have been speaking so far of strangers made friendly 
by working together against elemental nature. But 
nature can bring new strength not only to the most 
general and vague affections, but to all affections, 
even to the most sacred of human ties. On one of our 
rare country outings last spring, my wife and I wandered 
away from the violets and the apple blossoms and came 
all at once upon a place where the grass was afire. 
Some stumps and one small cedar were also burning. 
It was a bit of country precious to us both; so as soon 



170 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

as we had explored a little and mapped out our task, w< 
started to choke out the remnants of the fire. 

Some parts we could beat out with a stick, others wc 
smothered with damp earth. Before long each of us was 
possessed by that passion of accomplishment which so 
often carries one far beyond the original plan. We quite 
forgot each other, and when at last I straightened up 
and looked over the stump which I had been pounding, 
I could just see my wife far off on the brow of a hill. 
Her back was towards me, but I could see that she was 
stamping and beating out the patches of smouldering 
fire, quite as engrossed in her work as I had been in 
mine. When I joined her, her shoes were white with 
dust. There were flakes of ashes on her black hair. 
Her skirt was pinned up, and she was on the warpath, 
so intent on her task that when she raised her head 
her eyes scanned me for an instant almost as if I had 
been a stranger. But what I felt most vividly was that 
we had both been down into a bath in the elemental — 
"the healthy underworld where things slumber and 
grow," — and that in our very forgetfulness of each 
other, our love had taken up into itself some of the 
sweetness and patience of the earth. 

We are apt to think that our contact with nature, in 
work or play, is good chiefly because it benefits our 
health or increases our knowledge. But I think we 
should remember and cultivate nature's beneficent in- 
fluence upon our affections. On them, as well as on our 
muscles, nature bestows new spring, tone, and control. 



THE ALLIES OF LOVE 171 

Art no less than nature can enrich and reinforce the 
springs of our affection. How warmly we sometimes 
feel toward those with whom we have just sung a stirring 
chorus or a noble hymn ! Have not all of us come away 
from some deeply moving music, aware of something 
curiously familiar and endearing in those previously 
indifferent to us? Any lover of Wagner will recall, 
for instance, the wonderful passage in the second act 
of "Lohengrin," after the marriage of the hero and 
heroine. Their love for each other rises to a higher 
power when Lohengrin goes to the window and throws 
it open. A flood of spring moonlight and spring fra- 
grance pours in. Permeated by the beauty of the 
night, spring's creative forces in their veins, they are 
more deeply united to each other, and every spectator 
who has ears to hear is also united more sacredly with 
whosoever is dear to him. 

We must agree with Tolstoy that lawless art stirs up 
lawless love. On the other hand, to read of Stevenson's 
affection for Walter Ferrier x or Dante's exalted pas- 
sion for Beatrice, surely increases our capacity for the 
nobler types of love; for to appreciate is always in 
some measure to appropriate. 

Each of love's neighbors contributes something pre- 
cious towards the richness of its chords. Nature gives 
them a new timbre, art adds an ampler vibration. Play- 
fulness, patriotism, loyalty to truth and to honor but- 

1 As suggested in the essay called "Old Mortality." 



172 WHAT MEN LIVE BY, 

tress and strengthen them like contrapuntal melodies. 
Like a symphony without its mischievous scherzo, 
love is maimed and darkened if it cannot express it- 
self in "jest and sport and quip and crank." We laugh 
for love as well as for joy or triumph, and smiles carry 
the messages of affection as often as those of fun. 

By nature and art, by playfulness, patriotism, truth- 
fulness, and all the greatest forces in our nature, love 
is penetrated, nourished, and supported. I marvel 
sometimes when I see two people marry, and then try 
to feed their love simply on each other. It is incon- 
ceivable that any love can live and grow unless it draws 
sustenance, as every soul and body must, from the 
world around us, from work, from play, and from all 
the higher loyalties that we serve. 

Another ally of love comes to light when we answer 
the question: Should one ever force or impersonate 
affection? Surely not, yet love, like a musical ear, can 
be cultivated to some extent through knowledge. 
There must be something to build on, some basis of 
respect, or at least of compassion. But given that, 
we may confidently call to our aid that great master- 
builder of affection, knowledge. If we give a man every 
chance, he is almost sure to disclose some lovable 
quality. Knowledge joined with faith is the way to 
give him these chances. For example, you know 
people better in their own homes; you have there a 
promising opportunity to catch a liking for them. 
You find out some people's strength by seeing them 



THE ALLIES OF LOVE 173 

at play, others' by learning the structure and history 
of their past, others' by watching them as they build 
up plans for the future. 

Of course such fuller acquaintance may reveal not 
strength but weakness; we may be repelled where we 
hoped to be attracted through close intimacy. Yet there 
is no other path. We are taking the only chance, and 
if we persevere there are few personalities so repellent 
as to foil us altogether. I speak with confidence upon 
this point because some of the strongest and most in- 
spiring friendships that I have known were raised from 
very near the zero point of attraction to the pleasantest 
warmth simply by taking every opportunity for better 
knowledge, and by hunting for favorable points of 
view. The affection which gradually developed was 
from the first genuine and unforced, but it would never 
have come to anything had it not been cultivated and 
reinforced through every available avenue of knowl- 
edge. And after all, is it not quite natural that human 
affection should come to us, in part at least, through 
intimacy of acquaintance? One gets fond of many 
a city, many a landscape, many an art or science in 
just the same way, and most of our antipathies — 
though not all — are to be explained like Charles 
Lamb's by our ignorance. 

A friend said to Lamb: "Come here. I want to in- 
troduce you to Mr. A." 

Lamb replied with his characteristic stammer and 
drawl: "No, thank you. 'I 



174 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

"Why not?" 

"I don't like him" 

" Don't like him? But you don't know him!" 

" That's the reason I don't like him." 

I do not mean to suggest that we can often win a 
friend merely by scraping together a fund of knowledge 
about him. I mean that if you are once convinced that 
you ought to conquer a certain dislike or acquire a cer- 
tain friendliness, knowledge is one way to go at it. 

The influence of elemental nature, of knowledge, 
beauty, playfulness, patriotism, truth-seeking, — all the 
reinforcements which I have been describing, are for the 
most part a consecration of love, often a blessing, rarely 
a curse. For most of the perversions and diseases of 
love, which are just now so much in the public mind 
under the false title of "sex," are due, as I believe, less 
to an excess than to a deficiency of vitality, — less to 
lack of control than to lack of depth. 

But not all ! Swift-running streams drop out some 
impurities, but there are intrinsic qualities in the chem- 
istry of the water-borne molecules which cannot be 
changed from bad to good by any increase of power in 
the stream which surrounds them. We want a swift- 
flowing stream but the internal structure of the water 
— its chemistry — must also be right, else Ihe water 
is bad. Love also may still remain a vague, impersonal 
life-force unless its internal structure is right. That 
structure is my next topic. 



CHAPTER XXI 

LOVE'S HOUSE OF MANY MANSIONS 

In a happy marriage the wife's affection for her hus- 
band is often maternal as well as conjugal. She treats 
him like a grown-up son, looks after him and mothers 
him like one of her own boys. We all know this habit 
and love it. We should recognize that something was 
missing if there were nothing but the maternal in a wife's 
attitude. But we should also recognize something miss- 
ing if there were nothing but the conjugal. Moreover 
the pair should be good comrades as well as husband- 
and-wife and mother-and-son. Together these three af- 
fections make a richer love than any one of them alone. 

The filial and maternal may also be united in a single 
relation. I knew a little girl of ten, devotedly attached 
to her mother and fond of sleeping near her on the 
porch of their house. One night a storm blew in ; the 
mother was awakened not by the storm, but by the 
touches and whispered words of her little daughter 
who was at her bedside covering her with a rainproof 
blanket, and (as soon as she saw that her mother had 
waked) pouring out a stream of such endearments as 
a mother uses to her child. She was mothering her 
own mother et the next morning she was as much 
her mother's child as any one could wish. 

Extend to their limit the possibilities suggested in 



176 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

these examples : then all possible human affections are 
united in the richness of a single love. I have a brother 
who is good enough to make his home with me and to 
share with me the privilege of affectionate intimacy 
with his children. As I read or play with his eight-year- 
old daughter I find in my love for her, elements of 
every type of affection that I can conceive. The touch 
of her hand thrills me. I am equally conscious of the 
impulse to protect and guide her, to fight for her, to 
foresee and prevent the dangers that will meet her at 
play and in school, — in short, to be a father to her. 
I also want her comradeship; I want to work and to 
play with her as an equal and not merely as a hopeless 
"grown-up." And when I see how much clearer than 
mine is her sight for the new, how much fresher her 
enthusiasm, how much more beauty of speech, gesture, 
and mood her life contains than mine, how much more 
wisdom there is in her unconsciousness than in most 
of my thinking, I look up to her with veneration. 
Arounckand beyond all this I see that she belongs to 
the larger life of the world and to that Personality 
which envelops us all. 

If I am right in the interpretation of these exam- 
ples, we must learn to think of personal love not so 
much as a single quality or impulse, but as a house of 
many rooms. Each room represents some type of 
affection, — conjugal, paternal, filial, or friendly. Each 
room opens into those next it, so that an impulse 
originating in one must pass freely thro sigh all. More- 



LOVE'S HOUSE OF MANY MANSIONS 177 

over, the house is open outwardly. Through its win- 
dows there is a perpetual give-and-take between our 
affections and the infinite love of God. The currents 
of infinite love as they sweep through the universe 
rush through all the chambers of love's house, giving 
to all, receiving from each, mingling them with each 
other and with the divine. 

What are the practical results? If each member of 
the family of affections possess some traits of each of 
the others, then each is enriched without surrendering 
its central characteristics. We find, then, in each affec- 
tion a structure something like the present elective 
system at Harvard and at Yale, where each student 
must so choose his courses that he studies a great deal 
of one branch and a little of all the other main branches 
of knowledge. His scholarship is mainly of one type, 
but includes a dash of the other types for better sym- 
pathy with their aims. So a father will be mainly a 
father to his son, but will also be something of a com- 
rade and a brother to him, and will even look up to 
him in some respects as he would to a father. 

A physical element should enter into all affection. 
Even to clasp hands should always be a pleasure. But if 
we feel no physical attraction for a person, the contact 
of hands is boresome or distasteful. In exuberant and 
affectionate families, especially Europeans, it is natural 
for men to kiss men now and then, as women so gener- 
ally kiss women. This is the normal. When those of the 
same sex fall in love with each other, it means simply 



178 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

an exaggeration of the normal physical attraction which 
should play a part in all human relationships. This is 
no more shocking than masculinity in women, effemi- 
nacy or " old-womanishness " in men. The child pre- 
maturely old, the tomboy, the "sissy" have each of 
them too large a share of sympathy with types other 
than their own. But some such sympathy there ought 
to be as a basis for affection and mutual understand- 
ing. Why should a man be all strength and no ten- 
derness, or a woman all tenderness and no strength? 
Why should we not preserve as we grow up some of 
the child's playfulness, some of the boy's independence, 
and the girl's swift intuition? 

As character is the richer for a mixture of many sym- 
pathies and interests under control of a single purpose, 
so I think love is ennobled when all types of affection 
are united within it, under the leadership of one. A 
mother's love for her son becomes too clinging and 
sentimental if she is only his mother and not also his 
comrade. As comrades respect each other, every 
mother must learn to respect something in her son, 
and to recognize somewhere in their relation his au- 
thority over her as well as hers over him. He will 
come to treat her paternally as he grows up. Very 
early in boyhood he will have the instinct to protect 
her if she recognizes and responds to it. 

When a man is tempted to be base in his treatment 
of a woman, one can sometimes appeal to him with suc- 
cess in the name of her weakness. Because she is weak 



LOVE'S HOUSE OF MANY MANSIONS 179 

she needs his brotherly or fatherly protection; his 
guidance, not his pursuit. He would not treat his own 
sister so ; but she is in part his sister, because he has in 
him at least the germ of brotherly love for her. 

All the unworthy or unhappy affections that I know 
of could be set right, I believe, by a greater infusion 
of some other type of affection. By the appeal to 
chivalry we can call out a romantic element latent in 
most men's love for women just as we call on a boy to 
11 be a man " when he is babyish. He is not a man, but 
there are germs of manliness in him and to these we 
appeal. 

So far, I have been maintaining that love is true 
and right when all its varieties (physical, paternal or 
maternal feeling, filial respect, comradeship, and the 
rest) are duly mingled with each other or open into 
each other like the rooms of a house. Disasters here 
threaten us when we shut the outer doors and win- 
dows of our affection, shutting out the love of truth, 
the love of country, of art, of nature, and of God. 

Jealousy is a consumption bred within the structured 
house of love when all its windows are sealed. When we 
are jealous we try to shut ourselves up in shadowed 
privacy or timid miserliness. We want someone all 
to ourselves ; we fear that if we open the doors and let in 
the currents of others' affection or the winds of imper- 
sonal interest, our own share of love may be swept 
away. A woman may be jealous not only of her hus- 



1 80 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

band's friends but of his work, and even of his religion. 
This means that she has kept her windows closed and 
shuttered, so that she looks .always at the walls of 
her house of love, never through and beyond them. 

Personal love is enhanced and purified by the con- 
tact with elemental nature, by the inspiration of art, 
play, truth-seeking, or patriotism. Floating in through 
the windows of love's house, these interests sweep out 
impurities and cleanse the air in stagnant corners. 
They may be imperious and insistent, but unless they 
are allowed to break down the partitions and monop- 
olize the whole house, they leave it brighter and 
richer, never dimmer or poorer. They kill nothing but 
the germs of disease. Yet, if we are to persuade a con- 
servative and timid love to open its windows, we must 
first convince it that a friendly and beneficent Spirit is 
always touching our spirits as the infinite space touches 
our bodies, a Spirit which pursues us like the "Hound 
of Heaven." 1 

A vague and traditional awareness of this infinite 
spirit is preserved in the familiar idea of the "divine 
spark" within every man. But we know a great deal 
more about this divinity than our ordinary habits 
betray. 

1 In Francis Thompson's poem. 



CHAPTER XXII 

OUR AWARENESS OF INFINITE LOVE 

A college friend of mine, devotedly fond of his friends, 
was also devoted to his diary. On a certain page of this 
he inscribed their names and arranged them in the 
order of his preference. Here he listed his (i) best 
friend; (2) next best; (3) third best, etc., though he 
reserved the right to shift this order now and then. He 
thought this an admirably clear arrangement, and 
was much surprised when he found that all to whom 
he confided his list were moved straightway to inex- 
tinguishable laughter! 

But why this joyful noise over my friend's pet scheme ? 
Why do we look with mingled pity and amusement at 
that diary and at all attempts to arrange our friends in 
an order of preference? Order, we are told, is Heaven's 
first law, and certainly everything under the sun can 
(and sometimes ought to be) put in order and arranged 
in just such a hierarchy as we indignantly reject when 
applied to our friends. I believe that you will find it 
true that all finite facts can be arranged in a series and 
sometimes should be so arranged. The population of 
cities, the prices of pictures, the weights of children, 
the chemical ingredients of foods, the magnitude of 
the stars, — one could go on indefinitely with the cata- 



1 82 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

logue of finite things which can be reduced to a com- 
mon denominator and arranged in a row, often with 
profit. But you run against a snag the instant you be- 
gin to deal with things or thoughts which are infinite. 
Try to answer, or even seriously to ask the question, 
"Which is longer, past time or future time?" and you 
attempt the absurd. Try to state which is longer, the 
distance which you might travel through the space 
to your right or that which you might go to your left, 
and how either of these compares with the distances 
which you might go in any one of the infinite num- 
ber of other directions. You are involved at once in 
absurdity. 1 

The same absurdity results when you attempt to 
rank your friends. They cannot be arranged in a row 
and numbered as first, second, and third because each 
of them is infinitely lovable, infinitely valuable in his 
own unique service to the rest of the world. No good 
mother will admit that she loves one of her children 
more than another. She loves each with all her strength. 
There is no limit to her power of loving each of them, 
no limit to the amount of loveliness which she can find 
in each. With scrupulous and sacred sincerity she can 
write to each of her children a letter beginning "My 
Dearest." 

What does this prove? It seems to me to show that 
our love is traversed by the current of an infinite af- 

1 I know that some infinites are greater than others ; but I see no such 
difference in the size of the particular infinites which we call persons. 



OUR AWARENESS OF INFINITE LOVE 183 

fection which sweeps through us and off to whomever 
we love, — a current which cannot be compared with 
any other, because it is an infinite love, and if infinite, 
divine. 

Another familiar example may make this idea more 
credible. "How often shall I forgive my brother? Unto 
seven times?" Christ's answer: "Yea, I say unto you 
unto seventy times seven," does not mean four hundred 
and ninety. One limit is just as vicious as another. 
Christ meant that our forgiveness of any one whom we 
love is infinite, — that in true love there is literally 
no end to forgiveness so long as it means not condoning 
or forgetting, but the ampler understanding which is 
pardon. 

Not all forgiveness can be thus infinite. Forgiveness 
must be definitely limited, for example, in the official 
relation of employer and employee. There is an end 
to the number of mistakes which an employer can 
rightly forgive in an employee. But it makes all the 
difference to that employee if, when he comes to lose 
his job, he sees that, though as an employee he cannot 
be further forgiven, as a friend he still holds his place. 
I remember that to my mother, after fifteen years of 
service on a school committee, was assigned the task of 
telling superannuated teachers that it was time for 
them to go. Why this was always my mother's job 
is clear enough, I think, when I say that many of these 
poor teachers came away from the fateful interview 
loving my mother as a friend. They could not help 



1 84 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

seeing that, although in her official capacity forgive- 
ness must be limited, she never forgot the warmer and 
more human tie, limited by no official duties. 

We can make it hard for the gigantic forces about us 
to do their proper work within us. We can plaster up 
all the chinks of our nature for a time, but we cannot 
long escape the " majestic instancy" of God. I believe 
that the idea of a structural continuity of human and 
divine love was contained as a part in the meaning of 
Christ's words: "For I was an hungered, and ye gave 
me meat : I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink : I was 
a stranger, and ye took me in: naked, and ye clothed 
me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and 
ye came unto me. 

"Then shall the" (literal-minded) "righteous answer 
him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and 
fed thee? or athirst, and gave thee drink? and when 
saw we thee a stranger and took thee in? or naked, and 
clothed thee? And when saw we thee sick, or in prison, 
and came unto thee? 

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto 
one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it 
unto me." 

Christ's word "inasmuch" implies the sort of con- 
tinuity which we know in physics. As I write I am press- 
ing (not merely leaning) with an appreciable weight 
on my table. But inasmuch, or just as much, as I press 
on this table, I press upon the whole earth. Precisely 



OUR AWARENESS OF INFINITE LOVE 185 

as much power as I exert at this point is transmitted 
to the entire globe because of the continuity of matter 
and the indestructibility of energy. Inasmuch as I 
do anything to this table I do it to all that is in continu- 
ity with this table. Inasmuch as I vote and influence 
others to vote right, I influence the whole country, be- 
cause my vote and my influence are part of a practi- 
cally continuous spiritual whole. 

Because Christ is in a relation of spiritual continuity 
with " the least of these " and with each of us who feeds 
him or gives him drink, all the good will which we 
put out is transmitted to Christ and to the Father of 
us all. 

I do not see how we can make sense of Christ's words 
and believe them true unless we have, at least vaguely, 
in our minds the permeable structure by which I pic- 
ture our love in its relation to God, a structure such 
that love freely given to any of the children of men must 
at the same time pass through him to his Maker. Unless 
the whole structure of divine and human love is thus 
permeable, I cannot understand how our human love 
and our worship, our love of nature and of country, of 
work, of play, and of God can mingle and reinforce 
each other as they do. Furthermore, unless we think 
of our own personality in such a relation to Infinite 
Personality as I have hinted, I do not see how any 
sociable human being can bear without intolerable 
humiliation the volume of affection and gratitude that 
is poured out on him. In practice one explains it, one 



186 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

makes it sweet and sane only by passing it on. No 
human being can support the full weight and impact 
of another human being's love. It turns to absurd- 
ities and blasphemies, unless it can pass through us 
to God. 



CHAPTER XXIII 



SYMBOLISM IN LOVE 



Symbolism is a late and meager growth in many of 
us New Englanders showing itself considerably more 
in play than in love or worship. As a boy I saw no 
sacredness in the national flag nor in the symbols of 
religion. What others called " enthusiasm about the 
flag" seemed to me a false and painful attempt to 
pump up emotions which could not spontaneously 
arise. One set of symbols, namely, words, I was even 
then accustomed to use. Literally a word is nothing 
but a grunt or a cough, a vibrating current of air in 
the larynx, or a series of black marks on white paper. 
Yet by almost every one these literal facts are sym- 
bolically interpreted. Indeed the force of this habit is 
so imperious that when we wish to divest ourselves of 
it in reading proof-sheets, so that we can see precisely 
what the black scratches are, it is almost impossible. 
In this field of symbolism, then, we are almost all of 
us expert; but our proficiency is very limited. Our 
own home or our own fireside has usually a symbolic 
sacredness and value. We do not stare at its wallsVith 
cold literalness. We love them, and there are a few 
other symbols, such as bowing, mourning, Christmas 
ceremonies, patriotic songs, which most of us love. 



1 88 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

Nevertheless, the average American is stiff and awk- 
ward, when he tries to use symbols. Current thought 
and life discourage the use of such imagination and 
penetrative intelligence as symbolism demands: for a 
symbol which does its work must awaken us to the 
invisible. If we love the flag, it is not merely be- 
cause its image falls on the retina, but because we see in 
it much that is invisible. We see the history of our 
country as we know and love it, the beauty which we 
believe is characteristic of America, the national 
energy and inventiveness of which we are proud. In 
moments of enthusiasm for the flag these hopes and 
memories surge up and rush across the surface of con- 
sciousness like the picture in a cinematograph. It is 
because we see invisible facts that any symbol becomes 
for us pregnant with meaning. 

The marriage vow is a great symbol because it calls 
up with marvelous swiftness and vividness great realms 
of the past and future, moments which have led up to 
the consummation of this union, happiness which we 
look to in the future. In this vow we call the future 
before us as a witness ; "for better, for worse, for richer, 
for poorer, in sickness and in health." Before these 
invisible witnesses called to range themselves around 
a man and woman at the altar, the pledge to faithful- 
ness is taken. 

Any symbolic act or phrase points beyond itself. 
The most sacred symbols point to the widest and most 
precious reaches of invisible life. The most durable 



SYMBOLISM IN LOVE 189 

and universally solid symbols are actually part of the 
larger life which they call up. They serve us not merely 
by chance association, as a post-box calls up in our 
mind as we pass it the thoughts with which we last 
posted a letter there. The best symbol gives us a 
sample of what it symbolizes. Being married is part 
of marriage. Words like "thunder" and " zigzag" por- 
tray in miniature what they symbolize. An autograph 
stands for its signer : but not arbitrarily, for something 
of his character is given you visibly in the shape and 
arrangement of his letters. Unless the symbol is a 
piece of the reality which it symbolizes, and recalls 
that reality as a face recalls a character, it cannot 
serve the needs of many persons or extend its influence 
through the centuries. 

There are symbols that mean abnormality and weak- 
ness, not power. People who are clumsy in the use of 
spoken language try to make good their deficiencies by 
more or less grotesque gestures, emphases, and atti- 
tudes. The symbolic act is then evidence partly of in- 
eptitude. But, on the other hand, a man's acts may 
beautifully convey what words are too poor to express. 
There are feelings so elemental yet so intense that ac- 
tion seems to express them more naturally than speech. 
When the dead are borne past us in the street, we 
uncover our heads because that silent act conveys 
our reverence better than words. The act of bowing 
can be a trivial or ludicrous thing, but those of us who 
have seen President Eliot bow as he presents the 



190 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

degree of LL.D. will agree that only poetry could ex- 
press in words so much of dignity and significance. 
What splendid fitness and fullness of expression there 
may be in the act of kneeling, when soldiers kneel 
about the grave of a dead comrade, or when a woman 
kneels by her child's bed! 

The physical symbolism of affection expresses an- 
other deep human need. The clasp of two hands is lit- 
erally a physical contact of two pieces of human flesh. 
Woefully secular and lifeless it can be ! We all know the 
flabby, the clinging, the nervous, the icy hand-grasp. 
Yet who has not sometimes rejoiced in the grasp of a 
hand that conveys life and love? Two souls are here 
united by a physical contact that gives birth to new 
aspirations and new certainties. Two human beings 
are here linked hand to hand, in mutual respect, 
mutual trust, and mutual encouragement. 

Part of the richness and value of such experiences 
comes from the cloud of unseen witnesses who cluster 
about them. When I said good-bye to my father in 1 898, 
going into what turned out to be a ludicrously slight 
danger in the Spanish War, the farewell clasp of hands 
joined me also to many memories. I faced uncertain- 
ties and possibilities that gave me, I suppose, the same 
experience that I should have had, if the war had 
proved serious. My mind traveled back to the evenings 
when my father used to read to us from Emerson's " Es- 
says " the passages that meant most to him, recalled the 
long mornings in his study among the pine woods at 



SYMBOLISM IN LOVE 191 

Beverly where he was patient with my struggle to learn 

German, the afternoons by his side under a sketching 

umbrella, — my first lessons in drawing. At partings 

such memories flash through one's mind and one sees 

as from a hilltop, in a single panoramic glance, the high 

points of the past. There are pledges, too, in such a 

hand-grasp, unspoken but no less binding, that may 

reach across the grave, pledges of mutual faith, trust, 

and backing: "My faith in your fidelity till you come 

back to us " : " My love with you always." The parting 

words of Pandora to Prometheus in W. V. Moody's 

"Fire-Bringer," express incomparably the spirit of 

such a parting, and of all parting. 

"Whither though goest I am; there even now 
I stand and cry thee to me." 

Because we thus envisage the invisible past, the in- 
calculable future, somewhat as God must see the whole 
life of the world, the physical symbols of farewell contain 
in their union a myriad of meanings, hopes, memo- 
ries, and pledges to the unborn. Like the most inti- 
mate physical union of man and woman, the hand- 
grasp should set creative forces working through us and 
be consecrated in them. Live and ardent people always 
strike fire out of each other like flint and steel. Your 
best friend strikes thoughts and deeds out of you that 
you never knew were in you, and that truly were not 
full formed in you till your friend woke them to life. 
The need of them, the whisper of their coming, was 
there, but it took both of you fully to create them. 



192 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

It is through the symbolism of the physical acts such 
as meeting, parting, or waiting upon one another's 
physical wants that one understands the deeper signifi- 
cance of conjugal affection. Many resent the physical 
intimacies of love, because they take them literally, 
not symbolically; looking straight at them instead of 
through them. Nothing can bear that direct, passive 
stare and retain its sacredness. Viewed in hard literal- 
ness what is more ludicrous than the ceremony of rais- 
ing one's hat to a lady, what is more worthless than a 
dirty greenback ? Yet without a moment's hesitation 
we go behind the surface appearance of these symbols. 
In them, matter and its meaning, body and spirit, are 
fused into harmony as they should be, and as they are 
in the following words written by one of my dearest 
friends to one of hers : — 

"I want to tell you very boisterously and worship- 
fully how much I love you. I also want not to tell you 
at all, but to do something for you with my hands and 
feet, to make your bed, to pick lavender pine-cones for 
you, to do something you would never know that I had 
done. For of the many ways of love, one of the dearest 
is to serve in silence, to celebrate and not be found 
out. Mothering is a great business on these lines. The 
babies never guess or care how many myriad thoughts 
of love go into bed-making, or hair-brushing." 

In this letter the joy of giving expression to love 
in physical service is mingled with the exultant aware- 
ness of a purifying secrecy, which banishes the thought 



SYMBOLISM IN LOVE 193 

of reward. But her joy in the expression of love "with 
my hands and feet" is just now my special interest, 
because it is an example of that "unity of soul and 
sense" in love which symbolism makes possible. 

Though soul and sense belong together, they have 
a constant tendency to split apart, in work, play, 
and worship as well as in love. Work splits into physi- 
cal drudgery on the one side and unpractical scheming 
on the other. Thus we breed anaemic " thinkers" who 
accomplish nothing, and submerged laborers who put 
no soul into their work because they get no freedom 
out of it. 

Play and art are always in danger of suffering a simi- 
lar schism; music without expression, pictures that are 
all technique, exemplify the fate of sense divorced from 
spirit in the field of art. When shapeless "Spirit" tries 
to live without body, we are afflicted by the perform- 
ance of amateurs who neither learn nor inherit their 
art, — but try to sing without breathing and to draw 
without outlines. 

In love the same split produces, as we know so well, 
a blind and destructive passion which burns itself out 
without vision of individuality. But on the other side 
of the chasm we find a corresponding monstrosity often 
1 lis taken for virtue, a sterile and frigid aloofness that 
hudders at loud-voiced enthusiasm and is insuscep- 
tible to physical charm. It is as bad to be dried up as 
to be burned up, but worse still is to live in perpetual 
winter because we were born withered. Such desola- 



194 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

tion is no ground for blame; like any other inborn 
deformity, it deserves only our pity. But it never de- 
serves praise or helps us to defend a standard of noble 
love. For love, like all that mirrors divinity, must be 
incarnate. 

The "puritanical" reticence about the body is right 
enough if we are equally reticent about the disembodied 
soul, and refuse to describe or cultivate either body or 
soul save in terms of the other. We are often told that 
we should "teach" the sacredness of the body. Yes, 
but the body is most sacred when most forgotten in 
the absorption of hard work or keen sport, in the en- 
thusiasm of dancing, painting, singing, oratory, love, 
or worship. So it is with ! the soul. Taken literally 
"mental culture" seems to me as bad as "physical 
culture" wherewith the devilish split of body and soul 
has invaded the domain of education. To think about 
one's body or one's soul, to love with one's body or 
one's soul, is to paralyze the best activities of both. 
The foreground of consciousness should never be lit- 
tered up with such fragments of a dismembered self. 
We want to devote the whole of ourselves to our job, 
to our family and friends,to nature, to play, to beauty, 
and to God. 

In the industrial world the division of labor and the 
necessity of doing one thing at a time splits us up into 
woefully small and centrifugal units. This we cannot 
altogether avoid, but we must fiercely insist that each 
of these units shall be a fragment of soul incarnate, 



SYMBOLISM IN LOVE 195 

never an arid wisp of disembodied soul or a shapeless 
lump of flesh. If we can prevent that diabolic schism 
we shall never be crushed by the dead weight of drudg- 
ery, or enervated by fruitless and unchristian attempts 
to disembody our meanings or to realize them without 
the travail of incarnation. 

So far as we succeed in this attempt we keep sym- 
bolism alive in every action. When we build our houses 
and sweep our offices, clothe and feed our children, we 
look through these acts to a deeper significance behind 
them. We do them in the name of the Highest that we 
know, — be it business, family, nation, or God. We feel 
a deeper respect for the material, greater willingness to 
study its texture and detail, because we believe that it 
stands for infinitely more than appears. 

If I have conveyed anything of the sacredness of the 
physical expression of love, it will now be obvious why 
we shudder at its desecration. The greater the sym- 
bol the more horrible is its perversion. In "The Ring 
and the Book " Browning makes us feel the snaky loath- 
someness of Guido's crime because it concealed itself 
beneath a priestly robe. The crime was terrible 
enough in itself, but far more revolting because per- 
petrated by a priest, who used the great offices of the 
Church for mercenary and sensual ends. Was not 
Judas's kiss of betrayal the most awful act in history 
because it was through this sacred symbol of love that 
his treachery was consummated? So it is with that 
greatest disgrace in modern civilization, prostitution. 



196 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

It is not chiefly because of the physical miseries that 
may (or may not) follow in its train. It is because of 
the holiness of that great physical symbol which it 
drags in the mire, the misdirection of a world-force that 
ought to mean the creation or re-creation of all that is 
best in life. 

Love is consecrated not only by its purity from for- 
eign admixtures, but by taking up into itself the best 
life of elemental nature, knowledge, art, play, patriot- 
ism, and the devoted search for truth. These vivid 
spirits permeate love, and revive it by the infusion of 
their own virtues. When, moreover, the whole family of 
human affections and the Infinite Love which contains 
them are represented in each of the separate affections, 
then each of them is consecrated by the strength and 
tenderness of all. When through symbolism we "hold 
infinity in the palm of our hand" (or our hand-clasp) 
and "eternity in an hour," we are at the altar of 
consecration. 

When we make a dead failure of a living affection, 
we secularize it. Sometimes we begin the day with a dis- 
aster of this kind. Our "Good-morning" is as secular 
as a snore. We come downstairs half awake, our lips 
so sleepy that they scarcely move, our minds still 
torpid and vague. We shuffle into the breakfast-room 
and slide into a chair. Physically, mentally, spiritually, 
we have scarcely been penetrated by personality. 
Far within us its fires burn at a point near to extinction. 



SYMBOLISM IN LOVE 197 

But there is another and still worse element of secu- 
larly in our greeting. We scarcely notice who it is we 
greet. The personality that should exhilarate us is for 
the time veiled by familiarity. So often we have greeted 
just this comrade at breakfast that to-day the greeting 
has become automatic. The spirit has gone out of it. 
Were a stranger at the table, perhaps we might be 
aroused. A new personality might bring us to our 
senses like a dash of cold water. But as it is, our dull 
eyes merely record the outlines and colors of the 
person before us, like a savage who sees only black and 
white scratches in a piece of manuscript. 

When we are at our best, a flood of life pours itself 
out in the simple old words, " Good-morning," — a 
flood of meaning which strains to express itself in a 
thousand ways, but has to be content with verbal sym- 
bols. Our physical and vital energies, our love, our 
playfulness, our stores of gratitude for the world's past 
gifts, all that is calling us toward the future, comes 
rushing out in the time-mellowed greeting. The depths 
of us, the concentrated and imprisoned energy of our 
inmost life call across the distance to the unseen 
depths of our fellow. 

Through the external' and symbolic, the invisible 

depths of any friend loom up, not only in moments of 

enthusiasm, but whenever we are clearly aware of his 

individuality. "Love," G. B. Shaw somewhere says, 1 

"is a gross exaggeration of the difference between 

1 Quoted by Ernest Jones, M.D., Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 
I9H,P. 235. 



198 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

one person and all the rest." Translated from pagan 
into Christian terms this means that in love we call 
out to what is unique and individual in our friend and 
therefore infinitely different from all other beings. 
His individuality is always staring us in the face, but 
we wake up to it only when we love him. Others may 
not see it. That is their misfortune. 

In our use of symbols and in our effort to penetrate 
through them to what is lovable, we must give every 
one credit for his own type of symbol and his own 
fashion of consecrating it through affection. The rail- 
road magnate gazing at a mountain-side, blasted and 
seared by the clearings which his engines have found 
necessary, sees there the vision and symbol of the great 
railroad which is to be built. That is his child. He is 
blind to the mere external effects that to you and me 
are secular and shocking, the scarred and denuded 
hillside, the splendid trees and cliffs torn from their 
places. For the hopes and visions of the future, his 
dreams and plans of service, center in this spot. Their 
light illuminates the place for him. He sees it with no 
such alien and disillusioned eyes as ours, and we must 
put ourselves in his place, even though we may think 
that he has chosen the object of his affection strangely. 

We should be even more modest when we judge the 
historic symbols of the Church. If we can take the 
Sacrament of the Lord's Supper as an act of consecra- 
tion, it is because deep calls unto deep. We bring to it 
our *best store of thankfulness, of reminiscence, and 



SYMBOLISM IN LOVE 199 

communion with the personality of Christ. Through 
the symbolic elements, and in the service, we feel the 
light and heat of Christ's personality more vividly 
than at other times. Yet I remember that, looking on 
this ceremony as a child, I found it not only devoid of 
anything to excite my reverence, but prone to drag 
me below my normal level. Nothing can constrain us 
to symbolism. We may be bored or amused or even 
disgusted by it. Nothing can force us to find a thing 
sacred ; nothing can remain secular if we determine to 
make it sacred. 

Any unconsecrated affection, any infatuation, jeal- 
ousy, or nagging habit, any horror such as prostitu- 
tion or careless excess within marriage, errs through a 
low tone of personal energy, a feeble, drifting, slavish 
attitude, or, on the other hand, through an impersonal 
gaze. It sees a thing, a case, a machine, where it ought 
to see an infinitely valuable person. 

A symbolic deed of love is mystical, not because it 
is vague, but because of the richness of meaning packed 
into one narrow act. 



CHAPTER XXIV 



LOYALTY IN LOVE 



Writing of love and marriage in " Virginibus Puer- 
isque" Stevenson says: "I hate questioners and ques- 
tions. ' Is it still the same between us ? ' Why, how can it 
be ? It is eternally different and yet you are still the 
friend of my heart. Do you understand me ? God knows ; 
I should think it highly improbable." 

Stevenson hated such questions because he found it 
impossible to answer them truly. But I wager that he 
hated them also because of their dearth of venture and 
generosity. Such a timid questioner, anxiously scan- 
ning the weather-gauge of affection, finds it steadily 
falling toward zero. Under such observation no love 
can grow or flourish. We need not contribute all the 
warmth without waiting to be invited, but surely we 
must contribute some of it. 

I lived for a time some years ago in a community 
whose members seemed to me more tempest- tossed and 
unhappy than any human beings I have ever known. 
They were so "stupid in the affections" that they had 
never learned the most elementary lesson about human 
relationships, — that a passive attitude never works. 
Two of them happened to notice that they felt fond 
of each other; they married. Shortly afterward they 
observed no particular fondness for each other, and 



LOYALTY IN LOVE 201 

therefore separated. The winds of feeling blew them 
now together, now apart. Mated or severed, they 
were quite helpless and apparently quite unaware 
that they could do anything to help themselves or to 
maintain any single direction among the veering cur- 
rents of feeling. 

Probably every one of them knew that if he con- 
sulted his feelings each morning as to whether he should 
wash his face or not, he would find the forces of desire 
often at the zero point or on the negative side of the 
scale. But being moderns they probably pay no atten- 
tion to their feelings as regards so important a matter 
as cleanliness! In all practical affairs (among which 
the average American does not include affection) we 
know that loyal adherence to one's original intention, 
however one happens to feel, is one of the greatest 
forces that make for success. Passivity, reliance on the 
moment's whim, literalism in reading the face of the 
future or of the present, is fatal to happiness and to 
success. No business venture and no human creature 
can bear the passive stare of the utterly disengaged 
soul. 

Chesterton reminds us that if we face man with the 
cold and fishy eye of science, we cannot overlook the 
ludicrous and damning fact that he has two legs. To 
see him waddling over the ground between these two 
points of support is more than any one could bear 
with composure did he not view the apparition with 
a gaze tempered by affection, good nature, and faith. 



202 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

Yet, as he tells us, there is one still more unforgivable 
fact about man when we view him with the literal eye. 
How can one ever again view with favor, still less with 
love, a being whom one has actually caught in the act 
of making an opening in his face into which he then 
puts portions of the outer world? 

The point of these illustrations is this. Without 
commitment, faith, the power to distinguish and disre- 
gard what is unessential, there is no stability in any 
human relation. It takes but little experience to show 
us that no human being is merely what he is seen to be 
at any one moment. He can no more display himself 
in a single act or a single year than a musical theme 
can be expressed in one of its notes. A musical theme is 
all that it can become before the desire which launched 
it is slaked. So a human being is in truth all that he 
has been and can become, not because he now embodies 
it, but because that vast arc is the only sufficient 
explanation of his behavior, the only working basis for 
affection. 

But this attainable personality he certainly will not 
attain without your help. His fate is determined in part 
by what you do about it, and the most important thing 
that you can do is to expect of him always a little more 
than you can see, projecting your vision toward the 
unseen depths of his soul, not arbitrarily, but in the 
direction suggested by what he has already done. 

This creative act of loyalty as it overcomes another's 
diffidence is not unlike a football team "getting the 



LOYALTY IN LOVE 203 

jump on" its opponents. The opposing teams face 
each other in the rush line. The game, pausing after 
one of its "downs," is renewed. Each side tries to push 
the other backward. But it is not chiefly a predom- 
inance in weight or in strength that determines which 
line shall make an advance, which shall yield. It is 
rather a question of alertness. One of the teams will 
"get the jump on" the other by being the first to lunge 
forward. Whoever succeeds in preempting this initial 
ictus takes the other slightly at a disadvantage and 
puts himself into a correspondingly stronger position. 
The opponent's disadvantage still further weakens his 
opposition and lets the successful team advance with 
increased momentum. 

You can "get the jump on" another's diffidence if 
you shoot into his soul a message of welcome, of encour- 
agement, of faith in his power to do something better 
than he has yet done. You do not wait for him to show 
his best. Your impulse of welcome breaks down his 
reserve, melts his shyness, and brings him nearer to the 
thing that you expect of him. This is mirrored in his 
face. You see it, and your original faith is reinforced. 
You follow up the trail of sparks which you have spied 
within him; the spirit and exuberance of your quest 
redoubling in him the fire which you seek. 

No one can set a limit to this wonderful give-and- 
take, as the lightning of two souls leaps back and forth. 
Yet it is no mystical or unusual affair. Emerson re- 
ferred to something of the kind when he said: " I have 



204 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

heard with admiring submission the experience of the 
lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed 
gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is 
powerless to bestow!" 1 

Mr. Slack, a timid citizen, emerges from his door 
unusually well-dressed and thereby "gets the jump 
on" his passing friend Bouncer. The good impression 
made upon Bouncer is written in his face and instantly 
makes him more attractive and stimulating to Slack 
who brightens and responds by giving something bet- 
ter than his ordinary pale gruel of talk; a delightful ex- 
change is set in oscillation ; the day becomes brighter 
and the two march downtown to business in a path of 
glory. 

This process of "getting the jump on" any one is 
an expression in modern slang of a spiritual truth which 
sustains the life of industry, invigorates science as well 
as religion, and is the essence of psycho- therapeutic 
"suggestion." 

A fine example of this occurs in Shakespeare's 
"Henry V." The king is before Harfleur. His soldiers 
lean on their scaling-ladders, taking breath in a pause 
of the fight. By all they hold sacred in home and coun- 
try i Henry urges them once more to the attack. Then 
his creative faith breaks loose: — 

"I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, 
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot; 
Follow your spirit: and, upon this charge, 
Cry — God for Harry! England! and Saint George! " 

1 R. W. Emerson, Letters and Social Aims. Essay on "Social Aims." 



LOYALTY IN LOVE 205 

He saw them straining, — yes, with the eye of faith. 
They tugged like greyhounds in the slips, — especially 
after he had recognized their eagerness. He brought to 
birth in them more spirit than had otherwise been 
born, and they in turn brought to his lips, as he faced 
them, the very nobility of his words. A disloyal or 
uninterested spectator would have seen merely a crowd 
of dirty, sweaty soldiers. King Henry saw that, too. 
But within the gross total of what he saw he selected and 
summoned forth what most belonged to him and to them: 
— their germinating souls, their destiny, the courage 
which they had when he believed in it, not otherwise. 

Thus the best of one's loyalties, those to vocation 
and to one's mate, begin with a choice. With this 
profession, with this person we determine to unite our 
forces. But if we are to keep these pledges and preserve 
the spirit of youth, the initial choice must be renewed 
again and again. After choosing the physician's calling, 
I have still to determine what sort of physician and finally 
what particular physician I shall be. Within the broad 
field of medical service I must select the kind of work 
(research, teaching, public health, surgery, midwifery, 
general practice) which is best suited to me and seems 
most needed at the present time. Then within that field 
I must find some particular path, some combination 
of methods and manners which are individual and pro- 
gressive. Year by year our initial choice is thus revived 
and made more sharply distinctive. Success and hap- 
piness demand that it shall be so. 



206 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

It is the same in marriage or in friendship. Again 
and again we repeat and re-form our original choice. 
Within the domain of our friend's life we find a certain 
corner (his recreation, perhaps) where we can contrib- 
ute something to enrich the friendship. There are other 
parts — say his family life — where with our present ig- 
norance we are in the way. We choose and cultivate the 
parts that we are fit for, leaving the rest for the present 
undisturbed. Next year, when we come to choose again, 
we may be able to direct our efforts more effectively. 
Here we can learn ; there we are baffled. Here we are in 
full sympathy ; there we are in the dark. We select and 
select again, as often as a wave of enlightenment 
strikes us. 

But selection goes further still. There are double 
and triple meanings in many of your friend's re- 
marks. You can make a sentence or a person mean 
different things by the emphasis you put on selected 
bits. Then, if you are tactful, you pick out and answer 
the meaning most in harmony with the whole texture 
of your friendship; the other meanings you ignore. 
I do not mean anything subtle. A woman hears in her 
husband's greeting at night fatigue, anxiety, a shade of 
irritability, and a touch of playfulness. She ignores all 
but the playfulness, and by encouraging that healing 
element helps him to recover his balance. Just so she 
starves out some of her child's faults by choosing to 
ignore them and to cultivate his best. 

You can be willful and cruel instead of beneficial in 



LOYALTY IN LOVE 207 

this selection, or in all innocence you may go clean 
astray, but you cannot escape the necessity of choice 
by remaining passive, for even passivity is never neu- 
tral. It reinforces some element in your friend's char- 
acter. If you decline to choose, the wheel of chance 
makes the selection for you. 

An old Scotch phrase describes a lively companion 
as "good at the uptake." He is responsive, always 
ready to help out, always keen for the game. If he 
pauses it is but to make sure what game it is. On 
such responsiveness friendship thrives. When we ask 
a friend for the loan of his cloak, he is swift to strip off 
his coat also. When we ask for advice he gives us also 
sympathy and his purse. Later as an historian he may 
place and judge us, but now and as a man of action 
your friend takes his chances and contributes to fate 
his best strength. 

To meet our opportunity as Newton met the falling 
apple, to greet our friend as the "wasteful woman" 
greeted Jesus when she poured out the box of precious 
ointment (and was chidden by the onlookers for doing 
so much more than was demanded) — this is the way 
not only to friendship, success, and health, but to orig- 
inality and creative power. It is when we "greet the 
unseen with a cheer," then, that we and our opportun- 
ity enter into each other and of our union something 
new is born. 

In love, as in work and in play, give-and-take is the 



208 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

great source of novelty, of creativeness, and so of 
miracle. Therefore between friends there should grow 
up a child, a new truth and vision sprung from both. 
This miracle of sprouting friendship and truth is not 
best described as " giving " or " getting." It buds while 
we talk or merely sit together, fruit of our lives like 
other children, common delight to all, gift of God to 
all. Each of us contributes something; God over our 
shoulders contributes far more, which neither of us is 
conscious of giving but each of receiving. 

Friends always face the unseen child of their friend- 
ship, if they are faithful to their unspoken oath. Faith- 
fulness to this new child should guide every moment, 
every sentence. In every hearty hand-clasp, in every 
flash of eye to eye, something new is created. As you 
speak to a responsive friend you feel him speaking 
through your surprised lips. Then your words live 
and fit the occasion. You try eagerly to thank your 
friend for giving you such thoughts to utter. But it is 
rather God's bounty — his perpetual miracle of new 
life sprung up between two lives — that deserves our 
gratitude. 

For our "child" and in his name we can accept 
laudation without shame or self-consciousness just 
as we welcome money for precious ends. For the 
work, or the new insight which we create . together, 
we can take — nay, demand — "favors" which mod- 
esty would prevent our taking for our naked self, 
unclothed by the loyalties which dignify our clay. We 



LOYALTY IN LOVE 209 

can accept money, time, love in quite an amazing 
way, provided it is for the palace we are building. For 
this palace is one not built with hands, — eternal in 
the heavens. 



CHAPTER XXV 



IMPERSONALITY IN LOVE 



One of the most sacred things about human ties is 
this, that in any intimate and sincere affection you 
discover what is unique and, choosing it out of all the 
world, unite yourself with it. To you if you love your 
father there is literally no one else like him on earth. 
To outsiders he looks much like the rest of mankind; 
not so to you. It is true that you did not choose your 
parents, yet much that is most precious in your family 
tie is of your own making. Your own family life you 
have helped to build up ; the family jokes and customs, 
the pet words, tones, and gestures, are sacred to you 
in part because you have helped to create them, by 
what you have encouraged and what you have dis- 
couraged. 

The more durable relationships are moulded and 
perfected by a multitude of distinctions. If these dis- 
tinctions are blurred, the love within us that should go 
to build up a family life, a center for our other activi- 
ties, may burst its proper channels as electricity darts 
from the overcharged wire, destroying itself and other 
lives outside. When marriage is late or unhappy, be- 
cause of poverty, because people cannot find their 
mates, or for less worthy reasons, love becomes imper- 
sonal, a blind, gigantic world-energy, hardly a blessir L 



IMPERSONALITY IN LOVE 211 

easily a curse. When it fails to build up a home or a 
happiness, it may ennoble us like any other lost cause ; 
failing that, it may drag us lower than the beast. 

In perverted forms love falls from the spiritual 
heights of choice and mutual understanding, and is 
swept into a current where there are no distinctions 
between right and wrong, between higher and lower, 
between person and person, or between person and 
thing. The essential shame of perverted affection is its 
impersonality. It is so impartial that almost anything 
will serve its purpose. Losing the miraculous clear- 
sightedness of loyal love, we follow the blind vague urg- 
ings of a force that stupefies and debases us until we 
bump up against a human being as though he were a 
post. Persons are treated like machines. Indeed, a 
clever machine might do as well. 
l s If I am right in charging up the sins of the flesh to 
the score of impersonality, the scope of our campaigns 
against them must be widened and the tone of our just 
condemnations must be changed. In a recent book 
called "Hygiene and Morality " (though it deals almost 
wholly with disease and immorality), the great power 
of the truth is weakened by a bitterness which stimu- 
lates that most disastrous of all class antagonisms, the 
antagonism of all women against all men. 

Such bitterness would be impossible if we realized 
that the essence of the sin against which we fight is 
impersonality, the sin of treating a person as less than a 
person. For is not that a sin of which we all are gyJMy? 



212 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

Is there one of us who does not sometimes treat a per- 
son like a machine? Do we always think of the rail- 
road conductor as more than a machine for taking 
tickets? Do we not often treat our fellow-creatures like 
masks or flat cards without substance and personality? 
I have been striving for years to overcome in myself 
and in my medical fellows the stupid professional 
habit of treating a person as a "case," or a walking 
disease. But the habit of impersonality persists like 
original sin in myriad forms and unexpected ways. In 
law courts we treat a human being as a "prisoner at 
the bar," as the "plaintiff" or "defendant," to the 
exclusion of the fact that he is as real and sensitive 
as ourselves. 

I often" hear my faculty colleagues talk with similar 
impersonality about "the student," his failings and 
malefactions. But few of the teachers who speak in 
this way know their students even by name. They are 
further still from grasping the personalities which make 
up their classes. Yet merely from the point of view of 
success in teaching, it is folly not to know those whom 
we are trying to teach. I have often found that after a 
man has given me the opportunity to learn something 
of his personal life, his home and family, his hopes and 
forebodings, he begins to do better work in class. Such 
improvement goes to show that we never get the best 
out of people so long as we treat them as a class, ignor- 
ing the unique interest and value of each individual. 
Love at its best is a command as well as a desire and an 



IMPERSONALITY IN LOVE 213 

intimacy. Its law reads, "Find and create a new per- 
sonality in so far as loyalty to your previous pledges 
and insights allows you." 

If your love is pledged to one God, it is sacrilege to 
worship others. If you have sworn fealty to one coun- 
try, it is treason to work against it in the interests of 
another. If you commit yourself to the faith of Christ, 
you cannot experiment with teachings which contra- 
dict it, unless you first renounce your faith. You hate 
to see a dilettante meander from flower to flower of 
literature, or friendship, because you know that such 
a life is full of broken pledges and is falling apart from 
the rottenness of its own structure. 

But in many of our most poignant experiences we 
seem to love what is impersonal, and to make no 
pledges of loyalty. When a man drinks his wine or 
jumps into a mountain stream for pleasure, we do not 
reproach him with unfaithfulness or brutality. Some 
people certainly love animals as much as they do 
human beings. I think Emerson preferred companion- 
ship with trees, flowers, brooks, and skies to the com- 
pany of men and women. Many a musician loves 
music, many a poet loves "inanimate" nature as pas- 
sionately as he is capable of loving any being. Yet 
these affections seem to involve no loyalty. We turn 
from one to another in a way that would be villainous 
if we were dealing with persons. 

Love of food and warmth, of reading and sewing, 
adventure and research, love of beauty, — these may 



214 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

be very impersonal and lukewarm emotions in some 
of us, yet no cooler than our love of persons. From 
birth to death, tepid may be the hottest one knows 
in human relation, and there is no standard of normal 
temperature in affection. Neither is there any stand- 
ard for the degree of personality which we should 
recognize in our fellow men. Most of us can be justly 
blamed, when we stumble over a fellow creature as if 
he (or she) were a chair — most of us, but not all. Age 
makes a difference. 

On a crowded sidewalk of the tenement district have 
you never felt a baby wandering between your legs and 
fending you off with its hands precisely as if you were 
a tree? A few years later he will duck and dodge around 
your person in the heat of an exciting pursuit with just 
as little realization of your august and delicate soul. 
Such impersonality is normal enough in babyhood. But 
some of us grow long and wide, put on the dress and 
occupation of adults, and are piloted about the streets 
without ever ceasing to be babies at heart, — without 
ever acquiring the heart that recognizes a person as a 
person. More often we get over the baby's absent- 
mindedness, but never grow beyond, say, the ten-year- 
old's or the adolescent's limited sense of individuality. 

Swedenborg expresses this by saying that, in its 
early and elemental forms, our love is attracted by 
sex, not yet by one of the sex. Even in babyhood some 
girls show a decided preference for men. Love of a 
whole sex is already awake in them, but they are rarely 



IMPERSONALITY IN LOVE 215 

devoted to one man to the exclusion of all others. A 
newcomer is especially welcomed. This means that their 
love is at first general and vague, though later it will 
attach itself to one individual and cleave to him, for- 
saking all others. This lesson we sometimes fail to 
learn. We then remain impersonal and desire the emo- 
tions of love, as many people desire the emotions of 
music, without any awareness of an individual, or of 
the meaning of the piece. To yield to such a desire is 
villainy in case we really know better (as we usually 
do), but not otherwise. When we listen to good music 
we are actually listening to the outpourings of the 
composer's heart. He is speaking to us earnestly and 
intensely and we are listening to him, — not to it. And 
yet it is often no crime to drink in music merely as 
pleasure; indeed, for most people it cannot be a crime 
because they know no better. But it is always a ghastly 
mistake, for it is treating music, which is a bit of a 
person's life, as a means of sensual gratification. 

Do not misunderstand me. I condemn the act of 
man or woman who, knowing the nature of the act, 
uses another as a means of pleasure. But I insist that 
there are some who do not know the nature of their 
acts, loose livers who have no more idea that they are 
dealing with immortal souls than most of us have 
when we drink in an artist's music merely for our 
pleasure. Ignorance is often their curse. Sin there 
may be, but if so, it is the sin of impersonality and of 
sentimentalism. 



216 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

For the rake is a sentimentalist, that is, he loves emo- 
tion for its own sake. He will take or buy emotion from 
many, just as a girl may dissipate her energies in a 
multitude of suitors or of novels, sucking in the enjoy- 
ment for its own sake without answering by word or 
deed, without learning anything or building anything 
out of the experience. Her mind is too feeble to recog- 
nize individuality and to treat it accordingly. Let us 
blame her as we blame the ignorant sexual offender. 
For if we exclude (as in some cases we can) the evils of 
disease, alcoholism, slavery, secrecy, and violation of 
marriage vows, the curse of prostitution is this : It in- 
volves degradation because it treats life as less than 
life. That is a grievous error, but one of which every 
one of us is guilty in some degree. 

To recognize the universality of the sin which we are 
discussing makes us condemn ourselves enough and 
others enough, but no one too much. It is essentially 
the same sin which we meet in many forms : in official 
insolence, in professional blindness to the person be- 
hind the medical or legal case, in heartless gossip, flir- 
tation, prostitution. 

Have I been justified in using the sacred word 
"love" so broadly as to include sex-relations outside 
marriage? It is easier and cheaper to draw a sharp dis- 
tinction between love and the more elemental sex- 
relations which we condemn as merely "physical" or 
brutal. But I believe that the use of these distinctions 



IMPERSONALITY IN LOVE 217 

often does harm. To condemn even the most imper- 
sonal and momentary attraction as " merely physical" 
is like calling a man a mere brute or a child a mere 
blockhead. The name of the act tends to brand itself 
on the person, and to degrade him at a time when he 
most needs help. 

Call a dog a bad name and hang him. Throw mud 
enough and some of it will stick. The more degraded 
a man is the more he is hurt by our contempt. But in 
their ordinary context " merely physical" or "mere 
lust" are words of contempt, not of scientific descrip- 
tion. To condemn any conscious human act by calling 
it " merely physical" is not only bad psychology; it is 
an attempt to push a living act out among the dead, 
and the attempt may succeed. It is like cutting an ac- 
quaintance or disdaining a poor relation. Just when 
an act is most in need of improvement, we damn it 
with a phrase. Just when a traveler is most dreadfully 
astray from his road, we further dishearten him by 
telling him that he has no road. 

In the less personal types of love, falsely called " phys- 
ical," an elemental impulse, almost blind to the sacred 
meaning of its trend, is groping its way along. We 
should help it to find its goal, instead of branding it as 
forever outcast. If I think of my sight and my hearing 
as "merely physical," or if I am convinced that I am 
tone-deaf and color-blind, in either event no spiritual 
comprehension of music and color is possible for me, 
I can only give up trying. 



218 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

Those who are color-blind and tone-deaf in their 
affections are rare. They include among others the 
' ' moral imbeciles " of the courts. If we have accurately 
named them, they cannot do right or wrong, and can- 
not be hurt or helped whatever term we apply to them. 
But in the vast majority of instances we apply these 
terms with reproach and condemnation. First we sepa- 
rate body and soul by an impassable chasm ; then we 
attempt to spiritualize and subdue the body. A hun- 
dred recent books on "sex hygiene" tell us that we 
should teach the sacredness of the body and of sex. But 
the instant we have branded love as "body" or 'as 
"sex," we have begun to deprive it of sacredness. For 
the sacredness of love comes from choice, and a " body " 
cannot choose. The sacredness of love springs from 
enthusiasm and self -direction such as no "body" 
possesses. 

It is with an instinct that we are dealing, and the 
sacredness of an instinct is developed by showing its 
profound though vague spirituality. The lower can 
be rationally governed by the higher only if they share 
a common nature. Passion can be mastered only by 
an in tenser passion, not by any power that stands aloof 
and contemptuously denies its kinship. Personality 
is what we want in love, because personality is always 
both physical and spiritual. In the impersonal, one of 
these elements often seems to get lost, though it is 
never gone beyond recovery. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

INTEGRITY IN LOVE 

Personal love begins with a choice and a pledge. It 
lives on through daily reincarnations of that original 
choice in finer discriminations. It is debased whenever 
it becomes impersonal or passive. 

I have still two points to enlarge upon: first, the 
integrity of love; and second, its centralization. 

Integrity, whether in love, athletics, or debate, 
means that one's personality is well knit, cleanly ar- 
ticulated, "all there" when needed. 

"Nur wo du bist sei Alles, 
Immer kindlich. 
So bist du Alles, 
Bist uniiberwindlich." 

{Goethe.) 

The opposite of an integrated personality is an im- 
personal "loose-liver," and his sin is not only in his 
impersonality (just dwelt upon), but in his looseness. 
This looseness is like our dawdling days, our shapeless, 
plagiarizing or windy speech (which hits all around the 
mark like a drunken carpenter), our slack-minded 
skimming of newspapers, our vague complaisant purr- 
ing before a sunset or a symphony. Vagueness and 
diffuseness in love are bad, among other reasons, be- 
cause they disintegrate personality. Life literally goes 
to pieces. The scenes and acts of its drama express no 



220 WHAT MEN LIVE BY, 

plan, have no unity. The loose-liver drifts into an 
amour and out of it as drunkards drift down a street 
of theaters, lurching into one playhouse after another, 
without comprehension of their own lives or of the 
spectacle before them. The loose-liver wants the emo- 
tion for its own sake without relation to any loyal plan 
of life. This is bad in sexual relations outside marriage. 
It is just as bad inside marriage. It is shamefully com- 
mon in our relations to friends and to art. 

Personality, as contrasted both with loose-living 
and with an official and business-like way of behaving, 
is a fine art. To be a person, not an automaton, and 
to treat others as persons, not as stuffed images, is a 
task like that of commanding an army. We need to 
see what is now and for the first time before our eyes. 
We want to know exactly what we are about. If our 
love declines from integrity into infatuation or jeal- 
ousy, we are drifting in the trough of the sea. 

Such a declension takes many forms. A familiar 
type of it often causes undue alarm. When women 
lose control of their affections for other women, the 
life-giving force that makes friendship great, loses its 
guide and becomes infatuation. The evil of such 
" crushes'' or infatuations is not that some morbid 
and evil element called "sex" has suddenly entered 
the relation, but simply that the people have lost their 
heads. They forget their other interests and duties; 
they neglect their studies, their friends, and their 
health. They get morbid and sentimental, self-cen- 



INTEGRITY IN LOVE 221 

tered and soft. They are so near one another that they 
cannot see their way. They can no longer choose at 
all, for infatuation is idolatry, a form of slavery. 

The evil of infatuation or idolatry takes the form of 
jealousy when we are so near a person that we cannot 
see his background or our own. If you are infatuated, 
you want a person all to yourself; then jealousy is 
inevitable. The world's claim, the claim of other 
friends, is forgotten. You are so blind, so deaf that 
you want to own another person. But not even in the 
closest love of man and woman is there any .excuse for 
forgetting that they belong also to the world and are 
here to do its work. 

Jealousy and idolatry are opposite perversions. In 
jealousy you want to keep a person wholly to yourself. 
In idolatry you want to give yourself wholly to a per- 
son. These opposites may be combined. Idolatry may 
take the form of jealousy. But whether simple or com- 
plex, the diagnosis of the trouble is essentially the 
same. Choice, orientation, self-guidance are in abey- 
ance. The' personality has become split into conflict- 
ing parties and now one of these, now another enslaves 
the rest. Reason — that greatly maligned habit — is 
now precisely what we want. Reason cannot cure many 
of the diseases to which love is subject, but when our 
integrity is split apart, when we have lost our way and 
are wandering at random, common sense, the matter- 
of-fact spirit, the ability to reason things out, is the ob- 
vious remedy and in my experience efficient. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

RETICENCE, MODESTY, CHASTITY 

In the attempt to write about love, I am rushing in 
where angels fear to tread. Some of the most angelic 
and heroic people whom I have known never would 
suffer a sentence to be wrung from them on such a sub- 
ject, and my admiration for them is all the greater 
because of their silence. For it was their reverence 
which made them dumb. Love and religion, they 
thought, are cheapened and besmirched by being dis- 
cussed in public. I agree that this is often true. I have 
seen writings which cheapen and debase those great 
subjects; much which can be said about them should 
never be said. The idea that anything can profitably 
be blurted out in any language and to any audience, 
the ideal' of pure frankness, is babyish and barbaric. 
Babies and fools have no reserves, because they make 
no choices. Personality, decency, and all that is human 
in us grows up through selection. By their choice of 
work, of play, of companions, of words, people are made 
what they are. 

But every choice is also a multitude of rejections, 
more numerous and more instructive the further we 
advance. There is no virtue in emptying out your 
mind as a boy does his pockets; for minds, like pockets, 



RETICENCE, MODESTY, CHASTITY 223 

contain not only valuables, but rubbish of all sorts. 
Literal frankness is achieved only by maniacs and by 
village gossips, the doors of whose minds swing free 
and let out indiscriminatingly whatever happens to 
have accumulated inside. Such literal frankness con- 
ceals nothing, has no more reserve than one of the lower 
animals. I recently saw an advertisement of a book 
(typical of many more) boasting that about sex the 
author "has no reserves and shuns no details.' ' 

This is like saying, " Dr. Skinemalive is bold enough 
to reveal all the details of heaven, together with the 
anatomy and physiology of angels, the method of tun- 
ing harps and the construction of street pavements in 
the New Jerusalem. He has thrown off all false mod- 
esty. He has no reserves; he shuns no details." 

Any one who supposes that he knows so much about 
love and sex that he needs only to open his mouth and 
frankly emit the truth on these matters is astoundingly, 
pathetically, ludicrously ignorant of the huge continent 
whose shore he is touching. Frankness is a virtue only 
when the subject in hand is perfectly simple. For in- 
stance: "Are you or are you not hired by the United 
Railways to vote in their interest?" "Have you more 
than one wife? " " Do you like my cooking? " To answer 
these questions frankly may be a difficult moral act, 
but there is no need of modesty about our knowledge. 
We know enough to answer. The only question is, 
Shall we let it out? But the people who are quite ready 
to be frank and open about love, forget that their 



224 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

minds do not contain what they are offering, but only 
a caricature of it, ghostly as the harp and angel pic- 
tures of heaven, grotesque as the ideal of married life 
depicted in comic supplements of Sunday papers. 
The " virtue" of frankly letting out what we do not 
possess is a vice or a misfortune. 

For a half or quarter truth may be, in result if' not in 
intention, a gross libel. To call a string quartette "the 
scraping of horses' hairs on cats' bowels" is literally 
true, but if any one believed it to be the whole truth, it 
would become a blasphemy. Most of the " frank" 
statements made or printed about sex within the past 
decade seem to me as false and misleading as an account 
of music in terms of gut and horsehair. What we ven- 
ture to say on so great a subject must attempt to be 
representative of the vast religions left untouched, 
as the flag represents the country, — not literally, but 
symbolically. 

But grant {per impossibile) that a person might know 
all that is vitally important about love ; would frank- 
ness be then the chief quality that he would need in 
order to enlighten others? Does a great teacher of 
history or music need chiefly frankness to convey his 
knowledge to others? Does he not rather need art, 
painstaking choice of methods, scrupulous avoidance 
of anything that is misleading? Good teaching of his- 
tory requires eloquence, penetration, and grasp; it also 
requires (and this is my present point) rejection, ret- 
icence, and reserve. 



RETICENCE, MODESTY, CHASTITY 225 

The limitation of our knowledge and the difficulties 
of presentation should be enough to make any one 
aware that frankness will avail but little in speaking or 
writing upon any great subject. But in dealing with 
love and sex there is especial need of restraint. One 
brings up the subject presumably because one hopes to 
direct some one's attention profitably, to help some one 
to guide himself toward what is beautiful or heroic in 
love and away from its baser aspects pn short, to focus 
some one's consciousness aright. This attempt implies 
that consciousness can get out of focus, or can get its 
focus in the wrong place. Indeed it can, and most dis- 
astrously! Medical students, while studying saliva, 
sometimes become so vividly aware of their own 
mouths (the inside of them, I mean) that a copious and 
sometimes ludicrously inconvenient salivation results. 
I have seen a hospital patient drooling night and day 
as the result of a "fixed idea" about the inside of his 
mouth. He began to think about it and could not stop ! 
You can try the experiment and verify the result (on 
a small scale) whenever you like, but I advise you not 
to. I should not have brought up the unpleasant sub- 
ject at all but for a desire to reduce to absurdity the 
statement so often made that there is nothing about 
sex which cannot harmlessly and profitably be talked 
about. This belief is false. It is contradicted by the 
physiology of reflex action. Saliva can be made to flow 
copiously not only by pepper or any other irritant, but 
by thinking about the saliva in one's mouth. To be 



226 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

constantly or imperatively conscious of sex is to be in 
a miserable or a dangerous state. Talk about sex may 
produce or augment this danger. 

There is ample reason, then, for reticence and mod- 
esty when we approach anything so sacred as love. 
There ought to be a taboo, not about venereal diseases 
and their consequences, but about anything that tends 
to upset the scenery of consciousness and dislocate the 
background into the foreground. There is much that 
ought to be kept out of sight and out of consciousness 
most of the time, for the same reason that wise people 
do not think of their saliva, of their personal beauty, 
or of their personal ugliness. Consciousness does harm 
whenever it interferes with something meant to be left 
out of it, — the heart, the digestion, one's feet while 
dancing, one's self while speaking in public. 

One of the saving graces of reserve, then, is to pre- 
serve consciousness from dislocation. It has other uses. 
Reserve is normal and right about anything that is 
germinating in consciousness. To talk about such things 
is like pulling a young plant up to look at its roots, or 
pulling open a closed bud. You can seriously hurt a 
germinating aspiration, a nascent perception of beauty, 
truth, or love by exhibiting it in public or even in the 
full light of consciousness. Such things should grow, 
like roots, in quiet and in darkness. Books or talks that 
are rightly considered "too old" at any particular 
stage of a child's growth, do harm either by withering 
what is not yet ready for the light, or by stimulating 



RETICENCE, MODESTY, CHASTITY 227 

premature growth. I have no doubt that some of us 
adults are still too young for .many of the ideas that are 
floating about to-day. But who is wise enough to act 
as censor? 

Each "grown-up" must decide for himself, and to 
onlookers his decisions about reserves must often seem 
arbitrary. The choice of what you will bring into the 
full light of publicity, what you will reveal to a few, 
and what you will not fully reveal even to yourself, 
is as personal, as private a matter as the choice of a 
profession or of a mate. If each is true to the best 
he knows, his fundamental reserves and choices must 
often seem incomprehensible to the rest of us. We 
should expect and respect such obscurities in each other 
as we admire the half lights and shadows of a picture. 
We should deprecate the lack of them. 

One night, after reading Swedenborg, and imbibing, 
I suppose, something of his habits of mind, I dreamed 
that I heard the sound of many voices, and when I in- 
quired of my spectral guide what their meaning might 
be, he told me that they were praising the virtues of 
men. 

"Look," said one, "with what an agony of heroic 
effort that poor athlete is struggling to lift a hen's 
feather!" 

. "True," said another. "But can you not pity and 
praise still more that generous millionaire? See, he is 
giving his hard-won copper cent in bounteous charity 



228 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

to the newsboy who begs of him to buy the last of the 
evening papers." 

" My admiration," said a third voice, "goes out irre- 
sistibly to that high-born Fifth Avenue damsel who 
from cannibalism so rigidly refrains. In all the unspot- 
ted record of her life where can you find one charge 
of breaking and entering, one moment's yielding to 
the sweet lure of assault and battery?" 

I believe that much which is called chastity is about 
as virtuous as the people of my dream. Chastity surely 
means nothing without some temptation to be unchaste. 
It is as soulless and dead as the " courage " of those who 
are not aware of danger, or the " temperance" of those 
who hate the taste of liquor. In frigid people the ab- 
sence of sexual sin is no more virtuous than the ab- 
sence of hair on a bald head. Purity, like health or 
peace, may be an accident or an apathy. It may be the 
fruit of heroic victories. Only the Eternal knows. No 
acquaintance with a man's daily doings reveals any- 
thing decisive about the matter. Statistics and science, 
when asked to testify, have other engagements. Hence 
no one will ever be able justly to indict half the human 
race till a measure of temptation as well as of tempera- 
ture is invented. With such an instrument who knows 
how many zero readings would be registered? 

We cannot praise chastity as the abstention from cer- 
tain acts, for then normal marriage would be unchaste. 
We cannot praise it as the innocence of evil, for with- 
out temptation there can be no virtue. Chastity must 



RETICENCE, MODESTY, CHASTITY 229 

mean victory over the enemy, not ignorance of his 
strength. We must feel the temptation and overcome 
it. By what power? By cultivating the highest type of 
personal relation to which we can attain. Whatever per- 
son, book, game, or art wakes us to admire or to ap- 
proximate heroism in personal relations, discourages 
unchastity , for heroism in personal relations is the basis 
of all genuine chastity. 

By the consecration of affection we gain victory over 
the lower or impersonal affection. We do not eliminate 
the enemy altogether, but we prevent his dwelling on 
our territory. For unchastity is domination by the 
impersonal love of sex rather than by love of an indi- 
vidual. Such domination (inside or outside marriage) 
disorganizes soul and body even when no visible act 
of unchastity is committed. A certain type of day- 
dreaming and novel-reading may disintegrate and ruin 
character more hopelessly than prostitution. 

What is it that is poisoned or deformed by unchas- 
tity so defined? No law of the state and no law of health 
need be broken. In many forms of unchastity no other 
person need be injured, no utility need be destroyed. 
What is injured is that for which the state, the laws of 
hygiene, and all other utilities exist: the integrity and 
richness of personality. The worth of a personality is 
not determined altogether by the quality of the ideas or 
impulses which pass through it. Many of the thoughts 
and desires of maniacs, criminals, and degenerates 
have at some time, in sleep or waking, passed through 



230 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

most people's minds. But normal minds do not wel- 
come such thoughts or give them harborage. They are 
pushed out by an instinct of mental integrity which 
it is one of the main tasks of education to cultivate. 
They are warned to "move on" because they threaten 
that integrity. 

But in the effort to suppress mental anarchy it is 
foolish simply to eject offending thoughts and try to 
keep busy in athletics, science, or business. As soon as 
our attention is distracted by fatigue or leisure, what 
was forcibly (not rationally) thrown out comes creep- 
ing in again. An evil or impersonal love must be cher- 
ished and made personal, — developed, not crushed. 
The saint must become more human than the sinner, 
or fall below him because impersonal love (unwisely 
called "mere sex attraction") is less than human. 

I wish to head off two false conclusions which might 
be drawn from the foregoing remarks: first, that celi- 
bacy is lower than the marriage state; and, second, 
that in marriage, love can find its perfection. I see no 
reason to believe in either of these popular modern 
dogmas. The second depends upon the first. If we 
believe that in marriage it is possible to achieve the 
highest ideal of love, to reach the goal of perfection in 
personal relations, of course celibacy is at best a neces- 
sary evil. But if we believe, as I do, that marriage 
and every other form of human happiness becomes idol- 
atrous and hollow unless it is conceived and lived out 
as a symbolic representation of our union with God, 



RETICENCE, MODESTY, CHASTITY 231 

then in celibacy one may find other (and, for some 
persons, better) symbols of that union. 

The idea that marriage gets its highest significance 
as a means to the perpetuation of the race is to my 
mind another shallow one. Marriage is a means to more 
human life, but what is human life for? It is perfected, 
we are told, in marriage, wherein again it perpetuates 
itself in its offspring. This is arguing in a circle. The 
Christian idea of the sacramental or symbolic purpose 
of marriage seems to me the true one. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

IMPERFECT MUTUALITY IN LOVE: ROMANCE 

We expect and demand mutuality in all sorts of places. 
We are always striving for it in talk, in the interchange 
of actors and audience, in the relations of labor and 
capital, as well as in affection. Doleful and comic are 
the failures of mutuality in shaking hands. Some hold 
and pump our hands ad nauseam. Others go into a 
hand-grasp as gingerly as they pick a hot coal from 
the carpet. Yet for a lover, the touch of a beloved 
hand is almost a kiss. 

What have we to hope for in the attainment of a 
more perfect response in love? What can we do about 
it? 

Perfect response in any sort of human intercourse is 
almost as unattainable as literal justice (falsely called 
"poetic"). Some cherish the hope of a justice which 
always responds or corresponds with what we deserve. 
But as no man knows what he deserves or what would 
repay him, justice can never be more than a clumsy 
approximation to his desires. 

All responses are tainted with the same imperfection. 
When I laugh at your joke our wits do not precisely 
meet. Only a practiced tolerance or an unusual dull- 
ness can prevent us from seeing that there is more (or 
less) meaning in the joke than in the laugh; there 



MUTUALITY AND ROMANCE 233 

must be, just because the joke is yours. It has been 
bred amidst the particular associations, the unshar- 
able memories, the comic failures and abortive aspira- 
tions of your life. By these your own appreciation of 
your joke is tinged; but my appreciation cannot be. 
Perhaps I see more in it than you do ; I cannot see pre- 
cisely the same. But the point is that I see enough to 
join you, to follow you, perhaps lead you, as my an- 
swering laugh seems to say. 

My response means more. It dives as far as it can 
go in the direction of your meaning, then shoots along 
the rest of the way by the impetus of faith. God only 
knows exactly what your joke means to you. He knows 
far better than you do. He also knows exactly how 
much my answering laugh understands. In Him, and 
only in Him we ultimately meet, and it is our more or 
less enlightened consciousness of this absolute but hid- 
den union which makes the joke a success. We intend 
to meet, and because of that intention we do meet, by 
faith, which takes here one of its protean disguises, 
— an all-encompassing good nature. We laugh, partly 
at the point of the joke, partly out of pure good nature 
which pardons inanities and supplies missing links, be- 
cause it is determined to make the joke a success, at all 
hazards. Such good nature makes mutuality possible 
in fun. 

In simpler words, laughter is partly contagious, not 
purely intelligent. We often laugh from general sym- 
pathy or because some one "sets us off," not because we 



234 I WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

see the joke. The general upshot of his laughter hits us, 
whether we catch the point or not. Sometimes this 
contagion in fun happens without any effort on our 
part. Sometimes it is impossible without an effort, 
first to see what the joke means and then to project 
ourselves into the mirth any way by hook or crook. 
In lifeless moods we fail. We find the doors of our sym- 
pathy tight shut against the warmth of most people's 
fun. Their words and gestures penetrate but leave us 
frigid unless we can summon good nature enough to 
feel their spirit. 

j Without a free gift of good nature there can be no 
mutual understanding, especially in love. Congenial- 
ity, physical, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual, can 
never be perfect as long as we remain human growing, 
imperfect beings. Lock and key can be made to fit 
each other perfectly because they are dead, but if they 
were alive they would never fit. Only the less-than- 
human or the more-than-human can fit each other 
perfectly or answer each other's love in complete 
mutuality. Yet in love, as in laughter, faith can do 
wonders. Love meets love to some extent by spon- 
taneous sympathy, but far more by intention and 
contagion. 

Because of this "justification by faith" well-meant 
failures are infinitely touching and mutually endearing 
to many a faithful couple. Only Omniscience holds the 
whole of what a kiss or a blunder can mean, but when 
two mates know that, there is no end to their power to 



MUTUALITY AND ROMANCE 235 

bear, to forgive, to supplement, to take for granted, 
in love and word. 

Mutuality, then, is attained not because a prees- 
tablished harmony brings together exactly the right 
people at precisely the right time and gives each of 
them identical thoughts, identical joy, or identical 
affection which flame up simultaneously but indepen- 
dently in each. We meet and answer one another bur- 
dened by a double imperfection; neither can express 
what he means, neither can precisely understand even 
the bit that gets expressed. But love excites love in 
part, as laughter begets laughter, by the contagion of 
its intention. Granted that we are determined once 
for all to play the game and to meet somehow ; then 
we play into a common intention as court-tennis play- 
ers play against the same wall, not directly at each 
other. Practice makes us apt to anticipate our fellow's 
position. Mutuality in love is an "art" in which pro- 
ficiency is attained by labor rather than by preestab- 
lished harmony. But the labor draws us into adven- 
tures, into danger and daring, which is in itself enough 
to explain our incurable tendency to find love romantic 
and so perpetually to anger Mr. George Bernard Shaw. 

Shaw, and all who strive for literalism in love, set 
to work first to take the uncertainties and the infini- 
ties out of it. Marriage, they say, shall be a contract 
for specified purposes under state control. Love is "a 
idiculous exaggeration of the difference between one 



236 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

person and another.' ' These differences are in truth 
so slight that there can be no romantic adventure in 
finding one another, no danger of losing one another, 
no mystery anywhere, but only confusion and muddle- 
headedness. 

Now, romance, I take it, is the sense of mystery, 
beauty, danger, and infinity in love. We find these 
blessings in love as we do in night. Mr. Shaw finds 
them, too, wherever he is especially interested ; for in- 
stance, in the "hallucination" out of which his writ- 
ings (as he now tells us) 1 spring. 

To ignore the romance in love, in history, in games, 
in music, or anywhere else, is one of the easiest things 
in the world. One has only to slouch because one is 
sick of standing erect, to refuse the task of looking 
behind the obvious and relapse into sleepy literalism. 
As one's eyes grow fatigued with reading, the letters 
cease to be symbols and become letters only. Meaning, 
interest, and beauty die out of the words on the page. 
They are only printer's type, no longer signposts to 
infinite meaning. 

There is no sin in this sort of blindness, provided 
one recognizes that one's fatigue and not the letjg's 
are at fault. But to sneer at the letters because the 
are only ridiculous black scratches, to sneer at allv, h 
find wisdom or beauty in what these scratches mean,J5 
simply to stagger and lurch because one is too bored %t 

1 In an answer to the inquiry of the Modern Historic Records Asso- 
ciation, quoted in Boston Transcript, June 15, 1912. 



MUTUALITY AND ROMANCE 237 

walk straight. Every one finds romance in what he 
loves. He cannot keep it out. No one finds romance 
when he is too indifferent to look for it or too tired to 
translate symbols into meaning. A baby is a lump of 
flesh, a symphony is a long, confused noise, a picture 
is a bit of discolored canvas, and man is an ugly, 
featherless biped to any one who has not interest 
enough to see more. 

To all of us, when we are sleepy or seasick, the world 
presents itself in these terms. Now and then Mr. Shaw 
attracts notice by loudly exclaiming, in print, that a 
man can see best when his eyes are too sleepy to open, 
and that under these conditions he sees no romance in 
the world. Romance is not a surface quality. It is, 
therefore, no more visible on the surface of the sleepy 
man's world than excitement in the pages of the sleepy 
man's book. 

By being just a trifle more blase than Mr. Shaw one 
can wipe science, mathematics, color, and shape out of 
the world. All the experiences of our devitalized moods 
are flat, colorless, meaningless, and stale, and it is as 
easy to let ourselves get devitalized as it is to drop our 
end of the load which we are helping to carry. If we 
give up the effort of attention which sustains the world 
of romance in love, then science, commerce, and social 
life simultaneously collapse and we progress towards 
savagery. But tell me what most vitally interests a 
man and I will tell you where to look for the saving 
romantic grace of his nature. 



238 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

Mystery, beauty, danger, and a prehensile affection 
spring up in many a modern's mind when he thinks of 
his new automobile or of the wildcat stocks which he 
manipulates. Romance crops out in strange places, 
but better anywhere than nowhere, for without it we 
creak like dry sole leather. 



CHAPTER XXIX 



MARRIAGE 



In this book marriage means such a union of one man 
and one woman as is described in the Christian marriage 
service. For various reasons such an ideal union is not 
always attained in modern ''civilized" communities. 
But of late we have been told by certain " advanced" 
writers that it ought not to be attained, or retained, any 
longer. Other institutions, they say, — the State, the 
Church, — have been radically transformed ; but mar- 
riage, at least in theory, has retained its old-fashioned 
shape, which, according to G. B. Shaw, suits only a 
small minority of the (English) people. Is it not time 
for matrimony to join the march of evolution and be 
brought up to date? 

Moral and spiritual growth certainly ought to take 
place in the marriage relation, but it is often forgotten 
that change and growth are not the same. Change 
may be so radical as to destroy growth. Forest fires 
and popular crazes are changes which abolish develop- 
ment. Nothing grows unless it has a central core of 
identity which does not change. A tree can be changed 
into parlor matches, but it cannot grow parlor matches 
like leaves. The State can grow only so long as some 
idea of government persists. It can decay into anarchy, 



240 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

but it cannot grow into anarchy, because no "it" is 
left to grow. 

So marriage will not grow but decay if it "outgrows " 
its fundamental purpose. But before considering radi- 
cal changes, would it not be well to give it fair trial ? 
We can hardly say that marriage has been fairly tried, 
as long as man remains so fitfully and imperfectly mono - 
gamic as he now is. Let us call to mind what can be 
said, first in defense, then in praise, of the plan to 
make it a fact instead of — as now — an ideal. 

That monogamy is enjoined by Christianity and by 
modern Judaism, that it is the law of the land, that 
public opinion supports it enough to make frank polyg- 
amy a disgrace, that the history of marriage seems to 
tend on the whole towards monogamy, in theory if 
not in practice, — all these are important facts. But to 
my mind they are not a final justification of monogamy. 
For the current interpretations of religion, law, tradi- 
tion, and public opinion are subject to change, and may 
be modified by the conscience of a later generation. 
The torture of law breakers was once supported by 
religion, law, tradition, and public opinion; in fact, it is 
only within a century that these currents have been 
reversed. Marriage must have a foundation deeper 
than any tradition or enactment. 

Against secret polygamy and violation of the marriage 
vow it may be urged, first, that such secrecy involves 
lying and sneaking about back streets; second, that 
jealousy and marital bitterness are almost sure to 






MARRIAGE 241 

poison the lives of those concerned; and third, that a 
family racked by any such strain makes a poor nest for 
any children who may be born. These three reasons 
for monogamy are more important than those derived 
from shifting tradition or enactments. Yet they do not 
seem to me final. If public opinion changed, the re- 
straint of secrecy might be removed and lying would 
become unnecessary. If every one willingly agreed to 
polygamous and polyandrous relations, there might be 
no bitterness or jealousy in them, and it seems at least 
possible than any arrangement which suited parents 
might be made to suit children. They might not object 
to being brought up by the State according to the 
platonic principle. 

George Bernard Shaw and other Socialists appear 
to think that economic reasons are basic in the sup- 
port of monogamic marriage. If wealth were justly 
(i.e., socialistically) produced and distributed, no one, 
they think, could afford the expense of plural marriage. 
But if all parents worked and the birth of children were 
prevented, I do not see why plural marriage need in- 
volve increased expense. 

If monogamic marriage is to continue in theory and 
to be steadily approached in practice, we must have 
better reasons than any of these. Our belief in it must 
be founded on something more fundamental than 
economy. The temporary codes of Church, law, and 
public opinion jnust have something back of their 
fiat. 



242 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

A sound defense of monogamy must justify first of 
all its exclusiveness : — "Forsaking all others, keep 
thee only unto her so long as ye both shall live." Of 
course this does not mean that married people shall not 
make friends among both sexes. It can only mean that 
there shall be in marriage a core of primary intimacies 
shared with no other human being. The law insists 
only upon the physical and economic side of this prim- 
acy. So long as a man does not commit adultery, so long 
as he supports his wife and is not cruel, or, in variously 
defined ways, intolerable, to her, the law is satisfied. 
It makes no attempt to buttress the spiritual privacy 
of the marriage, but on the physical side the law stands 
for absolute privacy. Whatever else is shared, this 
shall not be shared. It is for the public good that the 
marital relation shall not be public or promiscuous. 
So says the law. 

Yet such exclusiveness is contrary to the general 
trend of the times. We are less andjless tolerant of ex- 
clusive rights and private ownership. Hence it is natu- 
ral that a considerable wing within the Socialist party 
should be opposed to all legal sanctions for the exclu- 
siveness of marriage. 

The justification of any sort of exclusiveness is its 
fruits in character. Tradition, law, and public opinion 
have been guided thus far by the belief that character, 
service, and happiness are best built up through affec- 
tions which are to some extent exclusive because they 



MARRIAGE 243 

are loyal to the objects of their own free choice. Is this 
reasonable? 

Let us draw some parallels from outside the field of 
married love. It is generally agreed that in the choice 
of a country, an occupation, or a residence there should 
be, if possible, finality. A man who wanders from coun- 
try to country soon becomes a "man without a coun- 
try." He is usually unhappy and amounts to little. 
It is hard for him to form lasting ties of interest, friend- 
ship, and service or to become a happy and growing 
creature. Law backs up this conclusion to a certain 
extent. Sometimes it forbids a man to emigrate or im- 
migrate. Invariably (so far as I know) it forbids him 
to hold citizenship in one country and then act against 
it in the interests of another. Such laws are violated, 
but the sentiment that each man owes loyalty to one 
(native or adopted) country is still strong enough to re- 
sist overt internationalist propaganda. Most of us be- 
lieve that, while we should be friendly with all coun- 
tries and open-minded towards their ideas and customs, 
such a brotherhood of nations ought not to mean fusion 
of nations. Like the "Jack of all trades" the" Jack of all 
nations" is too superficial in his acquaintance with any 
to serve it (and through it, all of us) well. 

Very rare in my acquaintance are the people who have 
changed from trade to trade and yet succeeded in any. 
The rolling man gathers no skill because he is not faith- 
ful to any job long enough to learn the soul of it, or to 
get its best rewards. May it not be the same with the 



244 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

"free lover"? While attracted to one mate, he per- 
ceives the counter-attractions of others. He is not 
narrow-minded. He recognizes beauty and goodness 
everywhere and wishes a generous share of both. But 
precisely similar counter-attractions offer themselves 
to every man who has set himself to do a piece of work. 
The other man's job, like the other man's wife, often 
looks more attractive than his own. Few men stick to 
their work because they are perpetually in love with 
it and never in love with any other. They stick to it 
because they have learned to believe that nobody ac- 
complishes anything unless he binds himself to resist 
his momentary impulses and to learn one trade as 
thoroughly as he can. Moreover the best rewards of 
work, financial and personal, usually come late. To 
leave one job for another usually means to leave it 
before we have got the best of it or given it our best 
service. 

To go from city to city within one's country is prob- 
ably commoner in America than elsewhere, and no 
one deprecates changes made before we have chosen a 
place to live. The preliminary survey of many places, 
if one can afford it, is as wise as it is to see many possi- 
ble mates before one marries. But when the choice of a 
place to live has once been made, every one regards it 
as an evil, though perhaps a necessary evil, to move 
away. 

These choices — of country, residence or job (or 
mate) — are usually exclusive. In taking one we reject 



MARRIAGE 245 

many, and often find the rejection very painful. Like a 
polygamist we want to grasp several of the alternatives 
offered. But we have learned the necessity of sacrifice, 
not only for moral reasons, but from pure prudence. 
If we try for several, we lose all. Moreover, most of 
these choices, since they are final, involve not only 
exclusiveness and sacrifice at the start, but devotion 
all the way along. No man likes his business every 
day: sometimes he loathes it; yet he knows that to 
throw it up and try another, or to drift about, would be 
crazy. He learns to disregard or to crush his impulses 
of repulsion for his job. He must "make good" in it 
whether he feels like it or not. 

All this we Americans have learned in business be- 
cause work is the thing we have learned best. But in 
love a wave of indifference or dislike is taken very seri- 
ously, perhaps interpreted to mean "time for divorce" 
or "right to be unfaithful." We are foolish enough to ex- 
pect constancy of feeling in love, though we know that 
in everything else our feelings vary like the weather. 

One reason for greater stupidity in affection than in 
business is this. You have one business and not (as a 
rule) a dozen near-businesses besides. But though you 
have rightly but one mate, you have many friends of 
her sex. A close parallel to the difficulties thus sug- 
gested and to the right solution of them is to be found 
in painting. The landscape artist does not welcome to 
his canvas all the beauties that he sees and loves as he 
sits down to sketch. The laws of his art force him not 



246 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

only to reject much that fascinates him, but to choose 
one point of delight for the focus of his picture and sub- 
ordinate all else. It is torture sometimes for the ama- 
teur, this enforced sacrifice of rival beauties, all of them 
desired. But the sacrifice (unlike that of monogamy) is 
enforced by no convention, by no law of State or of 
religion, but only by the nature of his own original 
choice. If he tries to combine all that attracts him he 
will do justice to nothing. When he chooses a subject, 
he pledges himself to one interest, forsaking all others ; 
but unless he is a saint or a simpleton he is tempted j 
a hundred times, while he paints, to combine rival 
beauties, loved but incompatible. Why incompatible? 
Because his picture, like his life, must contain a center 
of interest, a graded scale of values and of devotion. 
Without that center it falls to pieces. 

So in our human relationships, whether religion, law, 
and custom say so or not, each of us must try to estab- 
lish a center. Our faithfulness to friends and acquaint- 
ances must be subordinate to one primal loyalty, and 
what is owed and received in that primal loyalty must 
decide what can be given to others in the same field. 

It appears, then, that in many other fields of life we 
have convincing proof of the principle on which monog- 
amy rests. In science, in art, in practical affairs, in 
patriotism we habitually select a single interest to 
which all else then becomes secondary. Would it not 
be strange, then, if there were no need to establish by 
marriage such a center? 



MARRIAGE 247 

A plausible attack may be made on monogamy by 
picturing it as slavery. If monogamy is inviolate, one 
person seems to some extent to own another. In this 
twentieth century and in a land of freedom are we to 
admit property in persons? Certainly. All loyalty is 
binding as well as enfranchising. It is voluntary sur- 
render of one's freedom in the service of a cause. Our 
country owns us enough to punish us for treason if we 
are unfaithful to our citizenship. Any one who binds 
himself legally or morally to a business, a college, or a 
science is in some respect owned. Nothing is less free 
than art or thought or love. Each undertakes to con- 
struct something which needs time, perhaps eternity, 
to complete it. Each is going somewhere, and is bound, 
therefore, upon its journey. That journey, that desire, 
which is the kernel of individuality, certainly limits 
freedom, but it does not in any proper sense enslave. 
It is not slavery to bind one's self to fidelity because 
one wants something supremely. 

In support of these reasons for partial ownership of 
one person by another and for such surrender of free- 
dom as is implied in loyalty to the marriage vow, con- 
sider this : Whatever other basis there may be for pri- 
vate ownership of land, tools, or persons, it is generally 
agreed that the labor which a person puts into any- 
thing gives him some right to it. A stethoscope that I 
have long used fits my ear and trains my ear until the 
two belong together; no one else can use that tool or 
serve the community as well with it as I can. Hence 



248 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

the community is interested that a durable bond be- 
tween me and my tool should be established. Only 
long practice brings swift, skillful, and economic use 
of anything. In short periods a man and his tool can- 
not grow to fit each other. It pays, then, to let the 
workman keep his own tool (as he probably prefers to 
do) and not to share it impartially with others. It shall 
belong to him because he can probably do better work 
with it than any one else can. 

An unfinished manuscript or picture naturally be- 
longs to him who began it, because he can probably 
bring more value out of it than any one else. One need 
not insist that no one else could have done better with 
the subject had he started independently to bring out 
all that was in it. One need not insist that all mar- 
riages are made in heaven and could not have been 
better arranged. But is there not every reason to sup- 
pose that in marriage, as in work, it generally pays for 
partners to stay together and finish the structure of 
family life which they have started? Each has begun 
to bring something out of the other. Each has become 
used to the other, more or less, as tool and hand, writer 
and subject, are constantly shaping each other. As 
times goes on, husband and wife each acquire a hold 
upon the other like that of the musician and his violin. 
Each stimulates the other, now and then at least, to 
his best work, his best citizenship, his greatest happi- 
ness. Outsiders can rarely do so much. 

Beyond the field of personal relations there may be 



MARRIAGE 249 

still more fundamental loyalties which call one away 
from wife, from friends, and acquaintances alike. At the 
call of the country we rightly interrupt all personal 
relations. At the call of science and humanity it may 
be any one's duty to give up his life as uncounted Amer- 
ican physicians have given theirs. The call of con- 
science or of God may be so clear that a man may 
rightly leave wife, friends, country, and bury himself 
in a hermitage or in study that is without any known 
human benefit. 

These are rare calls, and partly because of this rarity 
they may bring grievous conflict of one loyalty against 
another. But when the final choice is made, it involves 
none of that disloyalty which monogamy forbids. l ' For- 
saking all others' ' does not mean ignoring country, 
science, art, or God. It means that as long as we are 
loyal to personal claims at all, — as long as there is no 
call to give up all persons (including,'it maybe, our own) 
for a supra-personal good, — one must keep a central 
primacy and privacy. 

Within the field of personal relations one should 
be loyal to each of one's subordinate ties, to friend, 
business associate, official superior or inferior, mere 
acquaintance, each after his kind. The artist may need 
as much delicacy of touch to deal with a subdued 
accessory in his picture as to finish its focal center. 
Each of the less intimate personal relations is likewise 
a fine art in itself. None can be confusedly mistaken 
or mistreated for any other without harm. 



250 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

I do not say that married people should belong to each 
other only so long as they bring out each other's best. 
The fundamental reason for continuity in marriage is 
not this mutual inspiration. It is the need of a prim- 
acy among our affections of various degrees. But when 
for this and other reasons people persevere in marriage 
despite many temptations to break away from it, 
they often reap in later life a harvest of mutual re- 
sponsiveness which only years can bring to maturity. 
Some of the best traits of marriage, — the subtle under- 
standing of what need not be spoken, the instinctive 
habit of filling in one another's deficiencies or antici- 
pating one another's needs, — these never have time 
to develop unless man and wife resist some of the storms 
and shocks of their earlier years. 

It is fashionable nowadays to talk of marriage as a 
contract between husband and wife. This is something 
like calling violin-music a contact between fiddle and 
bow. It is not untrue; it is merely foolish. There is a 
contract in marriage and there is a contact between bow 
and strings. But there is so much else that no one in 
his senses should pick out this subordinate element to 
characterize the whole. 

What sort of contract is marriage? How does it 
differ from a contract between a housebuilder and a 
(prospective) householder? First of all in this: Con- 
tracting parties are not usually drawn together by any 
mysterious and elemental attraction. Employer and 



MARRIAGE 251 

employee exert, as a rule, no subtle fascination on each 
other. Their differences have to be adjusted, while the 
differences of married people are often their most effec- 
tive bond. Give the complementary differences of sex 
a chance and they will work for each other's benefit 
without pay, without effort and even without capacity. 
In marriage, when mind and conscience sleep, our sub- 
conscious elemental energies may be busily serving 
the common good, despite our ineptitudes and even 
despite our sins. Of course this is not the whole truth. 
No matter how devotedly a man is attached to his 
wife, he does not want to be fastened to her beauty, 
any more than to her apron-strings. He wants to be 
rationally as well as magically linked to her. He wants 
to be led by her experience and her nobility as well as 
by charm. It is good to be thus linked by bonds of 
many colors, as we are in marriage, rather than by one 
drill instrument, a contract. 

For the many-sidedness of marriage gives it strength. 
Even two interests shared throw light on each other 
and on those who share them. Each reflects and multi- 
plies all, like a group of mirrors. Married people share, 
as a rule, more and more diverse interests with each 
other than with any one else. Houses, children, sorrows, 
relations (poor and not so poor), finances, reputations, 
meals, beds, opinions, prejudices, sickness and health, 
— who but mates can share so many and so richly 
varied realities? Who else has the chance to realize 
with soul and with sense how each reenforces the rest? 



252 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

Contrast with the many-stranded union of marriage 
the feeble bond that holds two philosophers met in 
argument. With only their professional studies to join 
them, is it any wonder that they so rarely convince each 
other? If philosophers were really serious in their desire 
to comprehend each other, they would live together, 
cook, eat, and sleep together like pioneers, share their 
gawky pre-philosophic past with each other, plan some 
romantic, some strikingly extra-philosophic adventure 
together, study each other's behavior in money matters, 
love-affairs, games, and family tiffs. It would take 
time — just as marriage does ; it would try each of them 
sorely — as marriage does ; but it might well bring to 
them and to their opinions some fraction of the mutual 
conversion, the mutual enlightenmen ^*macy, and 
esteem that bless marriage. 
t Any one who wishes to strength' 
ment with another, to appropriate aix 
other's greatness or to communicate his mc 
ished aspirations, must, I believe, do what he can I 
ape and copy marriage, humbly imitating the con- 
ditions it so richly furnishes for all these supreme 
achievements. It is because employer and employee, 
radical and conservative, plaintiff and defendant, are 
in contact at so few points, share so few of the benefits 
of long and close association, — are, in short, so be- 
reft of the trials and blessings of marriage, — that they 
waste so much vigor in fighting each other. 



MARRIAGE 253 

Theoretically our form of government ought to make 
us experts in marriage ; for we are supposedly familiar 
with the fact that in union there is strength. But in 
fact we shall learn more of what the national unity-in- 
var iety should be, by recalling how in marriage, sorrows 
explain and justify creeds, how children and other re- 
sponsibilities explain expenditures, how children and 
other miracles teach tolerance, how words are inter- 
preted by personal history, and hands grow beautiful 
in their remembered use. 

Of course I have not done justice to the richness of 
the marriage union: only music gives me the parallel 
that I need. There, the interweaving strands of mel- 
ody and harmony — each carrying its own spirit and 
meaning, each modifying and enriching the rest, all 
blended in the current of a single utterance — seem 
to me the fittest of images to suggest the interweav- 
ing and reenforcing of interests in marriage. Not a 
note in the chord or a phrase in the melody is itself 
without the rest. United they stand and give life 
each to each. Divided they fall and scatter like seeds, 
until some one plants them once more in fruitful 
company. 

Perhaps the greatest blessing in marriage is that it 
lasts so long. The years, like the varying interests of 
each year, combine to buttress and enrich each other. 
Out of many shared years, one life. In a series of tem- 
porary relationships, one misses the ripening, gathering, 
harvesting joys, the deep, hard-won truths of marriage. 



254 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

The unmarried can rarely follow so many strands of 
interest at once. They share food with one friend, 
work with another, play with a third, travel with a 
fourth, failure with a fifth, quarrels with a sixth. But 
with no human being can they share the light shed by 
each of these experiences on all the rest. 

The ripening of money by compound interest is slow 
and feeble compared to the ripening of compounded 
interests in married life. God forbid that I should be- 
little the sacredness of first love because I hold just 
now a brief for enduring marriage. But there is fas- 
cination in familiarity as well as in the first glimpse of 
a new world. A love that can remember its own develop- 
ment, can look down the lengthening vista of its ad- 
venturous past and project its future, has perhaps less 
quivering intensity but surely more volume and rich- 
ness than its opening days could possess. Such elastic 
strength comes only with time. Early love may be 
incomparable in its creative brilliance, but in maturer 
love we win the fruits of security. 

I know well that this very security may be base and 
slack. People may become so sleepily content with 
their marriage that they cease to care much about any- 
thing, even about each other. But there is another 
security that is not base ; I mean the reliance on one's 
footing that nerves one to a bold leap, the firm founda- 
tion which gives time to think and plan, opportunity 
to serve, to appreciate, and to grow. Even business 
needs some security if it is to get in motion at all. Even 



MARRIAGE 255 

the bomb-thrower must be relatively safe while he pre- 
pares and throws his bomb. 

Not tamely secure are the blessings and fruits of 
marriage. They must be rewon again and again. But 
well-grounded reliance on our right to try for them, 
and on our hope of rewinning them as often as we sin- 
cerely try, — that we surely need and find in mar- 
riage. 

All security ties some future's hands in order that 
we may risk something else. Fortified by good health, 
one may risk money; buttressed by money one may 
perhaps risk health. In marriage, the security ordi- 
narily attained is this : there is some one who forgives 
us more often and more freely than the unmarried can 
expect; some one who makes God's infinite forgiveness 
more credible. There is some one who loves us long 
after we have forfeited any natural right to be loved 
and long before we have won any. Supernatural in this 
sense marriage almost always is ; thus it prepares and 
enfranchises us for religion. 

In the forefront of my tribute to marriage I have put 
forgiveness, because I know nothing that we need more. 
We need it not merely to lighten the burdens of dis- 
couragement, but to stir us out of the apathy of habit. 
Fresh impulse to our work, fresh heart for the imperson- 
ations which every art and every game presuppose, new 
love of life and its author, — such are the issues of for- 
giveness. Your better half forgives not only your more 
obvious sins, but your awkwardness (behind which 



256 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

she sees some grace quite hidden to other mortals), 
your foolishness, your dumbness, your blank and un- 
inspiring face. Despite all these drab exteriors she sees 
something worth while in you, and because she sees it 
she helps it to be born. 

Forgiveness is to the spirit what home is to the 
householder. It is the assurance that in the house of 
the spirit some one waits for our deed, — the deed 
never yet done, but always due. That expectation is a 
stronghold to which we return at night, from which we 
carry vigor to our morning's work. Such security ener- 
vates only when it no longer nettles us to deserve 
it and, by this effort, to reestablish it. "Thy face a 
home, a flying home to me," says Chesterton to his 
wife. There is no ignoble torpor about a flying home. 
Unless we make shift to fly a bit ourselves, we are left 
behind. 

There is a bracing negative aspect to the marriage 
vow. It commits us more or less irrevocably to forsake 
all others. It cuts off the freedom to act on the spur 
of the moment. Unmarried, we are like the riderless 
horse who allows only for his own height when he ducks 
under low branches in the forest. In marriage we must 
choose our path more carefully. But this is just what 
the vast majority of us need. We need to be fenced 
into a narrower field than of ourselves we should even 
find. We need to be harnessed and given a bit of road 
to cover. In the end we put out more power and win 
more happiness when our choice is thus restricted and 



MARRIAGE 257 

our path narrowed by a promise, given and taken. 
We get somewhere because we are no longer so free to 
change our course. 

Any responsibility gives us direction and continuity, 
but marriage brings us in addition some of the choicest 
adventures that the world has in store. Certain of these 
adventures, or tests, every modern must meet and con- 
quer, as the mediaeval knight met the enchanters and 
dragons of the forest. If he misses them, he will slip 
out of life like a boy entering college heavily condi- 
tioned. Can you remember? Can you imagine? Can 
you be a good winner, a game loser? Can you resist 
satiety? Such questions form part of the examination 
which, early or late, every one must take. For some of 
these questions marriage gives us the best-known prep- 
aration and the fairest marking system. 

Take the last question as a sample. Can you resist 
satiety? Only by miracle, it seems; for every day you 
and all of us pay cool insults to the clouds, the trees, 
and the cities, to pictures and books, to fire, rain, and 
nightfall. You turn upon them the ignominy of your 
neglect and upon yourself that ignominy returns a 
thousandfold. With shame you discover that the pic- 
ture on your wall is practically invisible to you after 
the first few months. Just with the tail of your eye you 
brush across its surface now and then. Yet it has done 
nothing to deserve such treatment. It has not degen- 
erated. It is you who have degenerated, your color 
and freshness that have faded, your mental structure 



258 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

that has collapsed. Part of you has been killed to 
avenge the slur you cast upon an artist's child. 

Familiar and humiliating enough, — this defeat. In 
everyday life we have almost given up the hope of 
avoiding it. But in marriage we sight a better chance to 
win at least partial victory. For there, the well-nigh 
immovable body of our dullness meets an awakening 
force as nearly irresistible as any that human life 
encounters. There the test, "Can you resist satiety?" 
is squarely put up to us and we are given an un- 
equaled chance to win a victory or to duck under to 
one of the devil's most soul-destroying blows. Nothing 
in creation less deserves our neglect than the soul and 
body of the person we are pledged to for life. Nothing 
has so good a chance to rouse us and to save us. Trees 
and birds speak our language far less clearly. If they 
love us and forgive us, they are usually silent about it. 
When they serve us it is far from clear that they were 
meant so to serve. If they summon up the past and call 
in the future to refresh and to defend us, we are none 
the wiser. But the one soul that has a fair chance of 
saving us from the ignominious death of satiety, by 
warming our dull life with greater life, is the faithful 
soul called our better half. 

Victory here gives us hope of victory elsewhere. In- 
asmuch as we learn to see the perpetual novelty, rest, 
and charm which marriage offers to all, we have mas- 
tered one stage in the art of unsated happiness and of 
unchecked growth. Successfully married people have 



MARRIAGE 259 

more news to tell each other and more capacity to hear 
it eagerly than any less closely, less durably united 
couple can have. The habit of seeing and hearing freshly 
can be acquired in marriage if anywhere, and once 
acquired here, it may be gradually extended into more 
difficult regions. 

So it is I believe with most of the other tests with 
which the world invariably confronts us. If in marriage 
a man cannot learn to see himself as others see him, he 
will probably never learn it at all. If there he learns 
nothing of the art of vicarious living, he will never have 
again in all human probability so easy and inspiring a 
teacher. If family life does not spur him so to envisage 
the distant and the future that he expresses himself 
and controls himself somewhat as the present demands, 
he is apt to remain a donkey to the end. 

So far I have written mostly of strength and of the 
trials of strength in marriage. So much for the deep 
root of it. Now for its shoots and branches. 

Everybody wants to be understood by somebody ; but 
in the natural course of events everybody is more or 
less misunderstood or distortedly understood by most 
of his friends and acquaintances. They have no "call " 
to pay special attention to him and are rightly engaged 
in their own business. In heaven, scripture tells us, we 
shall know as we are known, wholly; but to most of 
us this perfect knowledge would be inconceivable but 
for the glimpses and tastes of it in marriage. Marriage 
gives us the best chance in sight to grasp our share of 



260 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

complete mutual comprehension. I believe that any 
benedict among us, the "pick-and-shovel" man, the 
shipping-clerk, the plumber, or the railroad magnate, 
is more apt to be understood by his wife than by any 
other human being. The bachelor and the maid (old 
or young) are less often appreciated with that ripe 
mixture of favoritism and keen sight which the married 
enjoy. 

Enjoy it they certainly do. Almost every one wants 
to pour out his joys, his troubles, and his plans to some- 
one who will meet him halfway. The number of re- 
served people dwindles towards zero in the intricate 
understanding of marriage. Most of them were re- 
served before marriage because they feared to be 
laughed at, quoted, or misunderstood. There remain a 
few who can never quite trust themselves and their 
secrets to any human being. They become monks (or 
their equivalent) ; or missing that outlet are apt to be- 
come dry and brackish. An outlet for free expression 
is the only way of insuring an inlet, — an intake of new 
power. Friends and acquaintances give us precious bits 
of their confidence and their attention, but except for 
our mate there is seldom any one who cares to hear all 
that we would say and to say all that we would hear. 
Others are more keenly interested elsewhere. No one 
else has so good a reason to be interested ; no one else 
is so often interested (and interesting) beyond reason. 

The intimate commingling of new thoughts and 
plans too fragile and tender to be grasped by any save 



MARRIAGE 261 

one, is as intense and peculiar a joy as any form of 
union can give. It is mutual creation, and all the leap- 
ing wonder and holy fear of creation attend it. The 
"marriage of two minds," in those who are also mar- 
ried in every other sense, is full of adventure and the 
pioneer spirit. I know well that this can be missed in 
marriage. But where else can it be so often found? Its 
perfection of swift give-and-take, heightening each 
personality by inflow of the other, is equaled perhaps 
when two musicians in some miraculous hour make 
and interpret music together. But it is only in the oc- 
casional raptures of nascent music that they can enjoy 
themselves in this heaven-glimpsing way, while hus- 
band and wife can sound each year the chords of a 
myriad newborn thoughts. 

Wonderfully close to the most sacred purpose of 
marriage is its greatest danger, — idolatry. But in this 
respect it is like all other good things. From marriage, 
as from every great gift, we are meant to learn some- 
thing greater, something more vital than itself. But we 
may miss its spirit and stick fast at its letter, like pupils 
who fasten upon the master's fascinating tricks and 
foibles instead of plodding past him to seek from God 
their own share of beauty and truth, unshared before. 
All human teachers are dangerous but necessary. We 
are tempted to depend upon them, not merely at the 
start, but so permanently that they pauperize instead 
of enriching us. Their finite stock of food exhausted, 
we starve. By the same fatal error, business which 



262 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

should be our symbol becomes our life, art degenerates 
into conventionality and marriage love, which should 
acquaint us with divinity, is worshiped instead for its 
own sake. 

Have you never watched the debasement of a beau- 
tiful voice under training? Its own original glimpse of 
beauty is soon lost and the image of another's manner- 
ism becomes indelibly fixed on it. So I have seen people 
lose their religion in marriage. The great teacher spoils 
them, because they have failed to go behind his teach- 
ing to the sources of his wisdom. Yet some such teacher 
we all must have. We may avoid the idolatries of mar- 
riage only by exposing ourselves to the same dangers 
in some other form. For, married or single, we learn 
mainly by imitation. 

How, then, can we best guard ourselves from the 
dangers besetting every attempt to appropriate the 
blessings of a great teacher, a fascinating symbol, like 
marriage? 

The chief dangers and failures of which we must take 
account are two: idolatry and " hifalutinism." The 
idolatrous marriage is slavishly content with its ma- 
terial and spiritual conveniences. The hifalutin mar- 
riage is a bungling of sentimental amateurs who will not 
learn their technique, who try to play the game without 
knowing the rules. It is too high and mighty to notice 
plain, or even beautiful, facts. It parallels the amateur 
artist's attempt to enjoy the spirit of his art when 
he has never mastered its materials or acquired its 



MARRIAGE 263 

technique. It tries to loll in the second-story balcony 
of love's home before it has put in the underpinning. 

All that I can say of the defenses against idolatrous 
failure I have already said. Of the hifalutin I have 
something more to say. I have insisted, perhaps too 
often, on the need of piercing through the letter of ex- 
perience to its spirit. For in this attempt it is easy to 
forget that what we want is the spirit of this letter — 
precisely this letter — not something like it. If we 
want to interpret the meaning of a text, the first es- 
sential is to catch our text, and to read it word by 
word. Then — only then — comes the leap of inter- 
pretation. 

One can miss the best happiness of marriage because 
one travels through it in kid gloves, Pullman cars, 
first-class staterooms, and grand hotels. Rich, city- 
bred, voluntarily childless, one can mince through mar- 
riage as sightseers promenade in a forest on a graveled 
path with hand-rails, signposts, and seats. On the other 
hand, one may know marriage as Kipling's Mowgli 
knew the forest, because he traveled as well in the tree- 
tops as on the springy ground. No one knows a tree 
unless he has climbed it, tasted its bark, felt out the 
spring and thrust of its limbs with pencil on paper, cut 
into it with an axe, clung to high branches in a rain- 
storm, as John Muir did in the High Sierras, studied 
minutely its cells, its osmotic currents and tropisms, 
After such knowledge of a tree one is fit to treat it as a 
symbol, not before. So it is in marriage. Knowledge 



264 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

and skill should precede as well as follow that vision 
without which we perish. 

In the chapter on "The Glory of Raw Material" 
and in the paragraphs on the good loser, I tried to 
acknowledge my reverence for the hard, raw surface 
of things because it is through just this surface, out of 
just this unique tang of crudeness, that a true vision of 
deeper meaning, wider truth, richer happiness is to 
come. Horror of the lapdog view of life, — fear of the 
amateur's bungling vagaries, recoil from the lie of con- 
ventional piety and chromo-colored enthusiasm, brings 
me back to the same theme as I try to base the idealism 
of marriage broad on the roots of things. 
\ Marriage, then, as a great teacher and symbol, bids 
us, first of all, study the facts, learn our technique 
faithfully, and play the game for all it is worth, with no 
shirking of its hard knocks, no fatuous assumption that 
we know it before we have learned it, no quailing be- 
fore the twin giants, — Success and Failure, — who are 
to be enemies or friends as we shall decide. We follow 
the game wherever it leads. Good winners and good 
losers we are schooled to become, in marriage as in 
sport. Then from the springboard of reality and skill 
comes the leap of faith. "Thy God shall be my God." 
We say to the beauties and puzzles of marriage as Ruth 
said to Naomi and as the Christian says to Jesus: 
"Where thou goest I will go." What thou teachest I 
will learn. 



PART IV: WORSHIP 



CHAPTER XXX 

SPIRITUAL FATIGUE: MOUNTAIN-TOP VIEWS 

It is a favorite trick with those who pretend to read 
the palm or the handwriting to say, with special em- 
phasis and secrecy to each customer : " I can see in your 
hand that the deepest and best of you has never yet 
found expression. Half unconsciously you are repress- 
ing a flood of power which pushes ever for freedom. 
To set it free will be the deepest joy of your life." 

The beauty of this ever-successful trick is that what 
the sharper pretends to discover in this individual, he 
knows to be true of every living being. We are pite- 
ously unexpressed. We differ only in the means that 
can set us free. How many in whom we least suspect 
it are longing to sing, — not to interpret a genteel mel- 
ody, but to let themselves out in song! The efforts 
expended in business, in sport, and even in affection 
seem comparatively impersonal and indirect. They do 
not free the breast, they do tell the tale. 

How many in whom we least suspect it are longing 
to pray ! How many who hardly suspect it themselves ! 
I believe that the craving to sing is but a partial and 
imperfect image of the craving to pray. What song 
is to prosy speech, that prayer is to song. It is the 
supremely personal and direct utterance for which 
creation longs, for which hard toil prepares. 



268 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

Yet worship is out of fashion. The average man 
thinks of it as something mediaeval or obsolete. He may 
excuse it like any other fondness for what is old- 
fashioned ; he may find it interesting, amusing, even 
endearing, in those who throw themselves into it sin- 
cerely. But in any case he looks on at it as a spectator; 
it is not for him. 

This is not horrifying or even surprising to one who 
believes, as I do, that worship is a permanent and neces- 
sary privilege of the human spirit. There are plenty 
of loafers and drudges who never learn to work, plenty 
of workers who cannot play, and whole nationsful of 
people who have only the most elementary acquain- 
tance with love. A vital organ of the soul sickens and 
shrivels ; yet the person survives in some sort through 
the marvelous compensatory readjustments uncon- 
sciously wrought out within him. 

More serious than dropping prayer altogether out of 
sight is the tendency to dilute it by bland and innoc- 
uous additions which make it more acceptable to the 
fastidious, but less nutritious. Thus Du Maurier tries 
to make us think that we are all more worshipful than 
we had supposed: — "Trilby sang a song of B6- 
ranger's and TEndormi said: 'Cest egal, voyez-vous, 
to sing like that is to pray and thinking is praying very 
often (don't you think so?), and so is being ashamed 
when one has done a mean thing, and grateful when it 
is a fine day. What is it but praying when you try to 
keep up after losing all you care for, and a very 



THE APPROACH TO PRAYER 269 

good praying, too? Prayers without words are the 
best."' 

"Yes," one might add, "and so are poems without 
words, and music without notes, and landscape with- 
out color or modeling, and life without consciousness." 
Doubtless the acts which Du Maurier so cheeringly 
puts forward as prayer are steps, perhaps long steps, 
in the right direction. They may prepare us as kneel- 
ing and other symbolic acts prepare us for prayer. But 
we must demand more of ourselves, because our deeper 
selves demand more of us. Emerson 1 asserts that 
"The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed 
it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of 
his oar, are true prayers, heard throughout nature, 
though for cheap ends." I doubt it. 

The farmer may have been cursing the weeds. Yet 
his kneeling and Trilby's singing might well have been 
preparation for prayer. We must recognize the value 
of symbolic and habitual acts like kneeling. Physical 
attitudes help us to think and to feel as well as to pray. 
When we want to concentrate our thoughts we relax 
the larger muscles and fix the eye. Emotion has also 
its physical symbols and accelerators, all the more 
useful because habit links them up with the emotion 
they last accompanied. 

There is nothing more ceremonious and super- 
stitious about kneeling and closing the eyes before 
prayer than there is about lying down to promote sleep. 

1 In his essay on " Self -Reliance." 



270 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

In both cases the action initiates and promotes the 
state of mind which we desire, especially when habit 
and association re enforce the connection. We need such 
symbols just as we need the symbols called " words" 
or "atoms." However dry and meaningless in them- 
selves they yet preserve and clarify the meaning which 
we give them. The fact that worship surrounds itself 
with beauty, with symbols, symbolic acts and rites, 
means simply that it is sensible and well-planned like 
baseball or business. For athletics and commerce have 
their own symbols which every one uses as a matter of 
course. We moderns are indifferent or averse" to wor- 
ship, not because it employs ceremonies and symbols, 
but largely because of our clumsy shyness in the use of 
this particular set. . 

But though many of us are now adrift and far from 
the land of worship, the shores of that great conti- 
nent are vast and deep-cut and the wind of the spirit 
blows perpetually toward them. We may not land and 
explore, but we can never tack very far from shore. 
To-day we veer away from some jutting cape, but to- 
morrow we wake to find ourselves in the shadow of 
some deep fiord, or catch a glimpse of snow-capped 
peaks as the land-fog lifts. Whenever beauty over- 
whelms us, whenever wonder silences our chattering 
hopes and worries, we are close to worship. Dumb im- 
pulses toward it haunt us in the pause before battle. 
To follow thought nearer and nearer home in lingering 



THE APPROACH TO PRAYER 271 

meditation is to grope for God. The deep joy of mutual 
love or parenthood, the decisive victory of the right 
in national life or in ourselves, brings us that wistful, 
wondering pause, that " orbed solitude" which is close 
to prayer. 

So, unless we are blind to beauty, deaf to the call 
of righteous battle, incapable of prolonged reflection, 
a stranger to the poignancies of joy and sorrow, in- 
capable of wonder, we are in perpetual danger of falling 
into worship as the tired mortal falls asleep. 

Worship renews the spirit as sleep renews the body. 1 
Our souls as well as our bodies get drained, now and 
again, of available energy. We "go stale" as Hamlet 
did, and to our jaundiced view the world too becomes 
"stale, flat, and unprofitable," or "sicklied o'er with 
the pale cast" of our own low-grade cerebration. This 
is not always the result of physical fatigue ; for people 
who never did a stroke of work in their lives are as 
prone as any to the symptoms of spiritual fatigue. 

Those symptoms consist for the most part of "stale- 
ness ' ' in various forms. They may be acute, chronic, or 
recurrent. In the normal growing man they return 
with each cycle of his growth and could be traced in his 
soul like the rings of a severed tree-trunk. The tired 
spirit finds a waning interest in familiar tasks; even 

1 Throughout these chapters on Worship I have borrowed freely from 
Professor W. E. Hocking's book, The Meaning of God in Human Ex- 
perience. Yale University Press, 1912. 



272 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

contempt may be bred by this ingrowing familiarity. 
What 's the use? What is it all for? we ask ourselves. 
Minor waves of spiritual fatigue, daily, weekly, or 
monthly, are often dully borne because custom has 
mistaught us to assume that all novelty must wear 
off, that familiarity necessarily blunts the keenness of 
appreciation, and that no love can last forever. The 
appetite for life, the zest and pleasure in recreation de- 
cline or disappear. In the acute and extreme cases a 
positive nausea of existence may seize us. 

Moreover, spiritual fatigue shows itself in loss of 
power as well as in a lack of feeling for life. We see 
neither straight nor far. We magnify trifles and ignore 
the universe. We pin our faith on the success of a party. 
We expect mathematically exact justice for our deserts. 
We cling to the letter of the law and demand our 
pound of flesh. We exaggerate the purity of our own 
motives and the impurity of others. Like a tired body 
heading for the elevator, we drift into thought-sparing 
devices, such as physical explanations of crime or 
economic conceptions of history. We demand quick 
returns on every expenditure of love or labor. The 
gambling habit, the cynical spirit, incredulity of 
goodness, timidity before new action, restless craving 
for new sensation, betray that irritable weakness which 
is characteristic of fatigue in the spirit as in the body. 

This suffering and impotence are natural enough 
because the efforts of work, the cramped application 
that is symbolized by bending over a desk and confining 



\ 



THE APPROACH TO PRAYER 273 

the attention to a single point "provide for their own 
arrest," as Professor W. E. Hocking has so beautifully- 
shown. As the growth of a colony of bacteria is checked 
by the chemical products of its own way of living, as 
there is something in the very nature of work that calls 
(through fatigue) for rest, so there is that in all Godless 
living which tends to draw us (through the pain and 
paralysis of spiritual fatigue) back to God. " Worship 
is the self-conscious part of the natural recovery of 
value" in life, when it has grown stale. For worship 
is the conscious love of the Spirit of the Universe, and 
we need it regularly like food or sleep. 

We need it to cure us of absorption in the fragment, 
to free it of lonely isolation. All good work implies 
concentration on detail, and all such concentration 
involves temporary blindness, like that of the unused 
eye of themicroscopist, who looks at a bright, nar- 
row, intensely interesting, field with one eye; his other 
eye is wide open, but voluntarily blinded. It actually 
sees nothing because it intends to see nothing. Search- 
light vision is strong and keen within its own field, 
powerless outside it. Taken alone, it is false because 
it ignores much. The mind is hungry for truth and for 
the whole truth ; it grows weak and restless when it has 
only fragments to feed upon. 

We who can give ourselves wholly to the whole alone, 
are perpetually trying to give ourselves whole-heart- 
edly to this piece of business, to that reform, to this pa- 
tient, to this picture. We are not built so. We cannot 



274 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

get the whole of ourselves into our daily I work, not 
even into our play or our love. The fruitless attempt 
results in a cramp of the soul which hardens into per- 
manent contracture, unless we relieve it by a soul- 
stretch, such as a tired man gives when he opens arms 
and legs wide and extends himself like a starfish. 
Prayer has been often and rightly described in meta- 
phors of opening a shuttered and darkened existence 
to let in the light of Heaven. The figure implies that 
normally we are in open communication with the 
whole spirit and purpose of life, just as our bodies are 
in open communication, through the interchange of 
breathing and the radiation of heat, with the whole 
physical universe. 

Nevertheless we attempt again and again to shut our- 
selves off in spiritually unventilated corners. There 
we stifle and droop. Play and love revive us partially 
because they take us into better- ventilated, less 
cramped activities. Worship fulfills what play, art, and 
love attempt. 1 "Pleasure, recreation, friendship, the 
companionship of men and women, beauty, — all 
these recall the outgoings of ambition and moral effort 
and unite a man with his natural appreciation. Wor- 
ship is the whole which includes them." 2 

Because worship is a renewal of our depleted spiritual 

1 " Worship is ideally capable of fulfilling all the functions of the other 
means of re-integrating selfhood, whether of love, of recreation, or of 
sleep itself (witness the exploits in comparative sleeplessness of Madame 
Guyon, of Philip of Alcantara, and of many another)." Hocking, p. 563. 

2 Hocking, p. 418. 



THE APPROACH TO PRAYER 275 

energies, it is naturally intermittent. One need not jeer 
at the worshiper for spending so little time on that 
which he declares to be his salvation. For it is in work, 
play, and love that he must earn the right to pray as 
he earns the promise of sleep. No one can find out 
except by trying whether he needs prayer once an hour, 
once a week, or less often. The rhythm of its recurrence 
should be governed like that of any physiological func- 
tion, varying like food, sleep and recreation, with our 
expenditures of effort and energy. 1 

We often advise each other to " think it over and see 
what on the whole seems best"; or we say, "All things 
considered, I have decided to go." Any one who did 
this would be near to prayer. Such phrases are loosely 
used, but they suggest that once upon a time, in the 
morning of life, when the phrase and the phrase- 
maker were new, some one verily tried to shape his 
decision after considering all things that lay within his 
range of vision. Preserved in that phrase is somebody's 
revulsion from snap-judgments, some one's determina- 
tion to get a view of the background and middle dis- 
tance of his life as well as its foreground, and to shape 
his course accordingly. We live in choked and con- 
fusing foregrounds, full of noise and fury, but crammed 
with significance. We must not miss the message of the 

1 There is, however, another type of prayer-like consciousness which, 
like breathing, should be in perpetual operation. Perhaps something 
more like aspiration than prayer is what St. Paul had in mind when he 
bade us "pray without ceasing," something which I shall try to describe 
more fully below. 



276 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

moment. The present is full of brand-new events, 
each bearing in its hand a letter personally addressed 
to you and another to me. These messages must be 
read and promptly answered, else we miss our chance 
and disappoint many hopes. But if we are not to be 
batted about like clowns in a circus, we must now and 
then pull out of the stress and see what it means, after 
"considering all things" that are past and distant, or 
future and shadowy, but still alive and at work in our 
minds. 

"Considering all things" is turning from part to 
whole, from brilliant near-seen views, all foreground, no 
perspective, to a vision like that from a mountain-top. 
Whoever tries to "see life steadily and see it whole" 
by retiring to a viewpoint detached from the current 
quotations and the latest news has moved in the direc- 
tion of prayer. Your soul and mine are parts of God. 
We forget this. Prayer reminds us. 

It is especially when we are confused and uncertain 
what next to do that we turn from partial to wider 
views. When lost in the woods you climb the highest 
tree in sight. From the top of it you may be able to 
see where you have come from, where you are, and 
where you should go next. Such a view is precisely 
what prayer gives. It orients us. As we look over our 
stumbling, circuitous past we see where we have veered 
from the track that we meant to keep. We see just 
where our mingled success and failure have landed us. 
We look ahead and shape our course afresh. 



THE APPROACH TO PRAYER 277 

It takes time, this tree-climbing, and in any party 
of woodsmen there is usually one who begrudges that 
time. The evening is pressing on. Tree-climbing 
does n't get us ahead. It may give pretty views, but 
while we are waiting idle here we might, by ranging 
about, have hit upon the path. Similar reproaches 
are directed at prayer and worship. The immediate 
utility of the rites and ceremonies of worship is as little 
as that of painfully shinning up the tree. We are not 
then or there getting ahead with our jobs. We have 
turned away from the world; we seem to be getting 
" other- worldly' ' and monkish. 

But it is the greenhorn, not the old woodsman, who 
chafes at the halt for a look around. The best way to 
get ahead is sometimes to stop short and see where we 
are. The best way to advance our work is, sometimes, 
to lay it aside and go to bed. On the whole, all things 
considered, we may find ourselves on the wrong track. 
Then our pause has been time well spent. 

When the captain takes an observation at sea to 
settle the ship's position, her run and her course, he 
gives up for the time being the task of sailing the ship 
Whatever he has been doing to earn his pay and get the 
ship ahead, he must quit while he is taking his daily 
observation. His detachment from ordinary work 
during that observation, has a parallel in the apparent 
uselessness of prayer. It bakes no bread ; it cuts no ice. 
It leaves the present and the foreground of life for others 
to attend to. It retires for a fresh look at the whole, 



278 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

as a painter stops and backs away from his canvas, 
now and then, to get a truer impression of what he has 
been doing, and has still to do. "Why don't you stick 
to your painting? " an outsider might say. " You 'd get 
along much faster if you kept your eyes open and 
painted steadily, instead of stopping so often and 
squinting through your half -closed eyelids." Smart 
but false. 

There are many other familiar acts which suggest 
the value of prayer-pauses in the zealous practice of our 
vocation. The locomotive engineer, peering about the 
vitals of his engine during a stop, has often reminded 
me of Sunday worship. The shopman who periodically 
closes shop and refuses customers, while he takes ac- 
count of stock, knows better at the end of the pause 
where, on the whole, he is and what he should do next. 
The factory engineer knows that his machinery, like 
his help, needs to rest one day in seven. When the power 
is turned off, he can carefully go over his machinery, 
find flaws and weak spots (as any one of us finds them 
in himself when he prays), and thus true up the whole. 



CHAPTER XXXI 

RECOLLECTION: DISENTHRALLMENT: SOLITUDE AND 
SINCERITY: THE REENFORCEMENT OF ASSOCIATION 

No one is armor-proof against forgetfulness. Most of 
the facts and faces that we meet, soon become as dead 
as if they had never lived in our experience. We do 
not keenly regret their death. But our plight becomes 
more serious when we forget what we had intended to 
remember. To me the stupendous total of our unin- 
tended forgettings is one of the tragic and humiliating 
facts of existence. Most serious of all, however, is the 
kind of forgetfulness acknowledged by a boy of my 
acquaintance who, after shirking his music lesson, 
very truthfully explained that, though he had not for- 
gotten the lesson, he had forgotten the importance of it} 
It is this sort of forgetfulness that really disintegrates 
personality. A little more of this and a man splits into 
"multiple personalities," a polite way of saying that 
he has "gone to pieces.' ' 

The double and triple lives that we lead may trans- 
gress no law of conventional morality and yet may dis- 
sipate our force and squander the spirit's patrimony 
more than riotous living. Home life, business life, and 
recreation dwell in compartments so separate that each 
forgets the others and may contradict them. This 
division and mutual estrangement of our energies surely 

1 See Every Day Ethics, by Ella Lyman Cabot. H. Holt & Co., p. 217. 



28o WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

calls for some effort to pull ourselves together, to intro- 
duce the different sides of ourselves each to each and 
see them at least cooperate instead of competing. 

When we set ourselves to this work of collecting or 
re-collecting the scattered pieces of ourselves, we be- 
gin a task which, if carried to its natural conclusion, 
ultimately becomes prayer. We are driven to some- 
thing of the sort when the shock of illness, war, bank- 
ruptcy, or death has shaken us out of the rut of habit 
and brought us face to face with the mess which we are 
making of our years. It was after such a shock Lincoln 
called the whole nation to prayer in his message of 
December I, 1862: "The dogmas of the quiet past are 
inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is 
piled high with difficulty and we must rise to the occa- 
sion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and 
act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we 
shall save our country." 

Recollection leads now and again to disenthrallment. 
But innocence preserves us perpetually free of the en- 
thrallments of habit and falsehood. In Hans Christian 
Andersen's story, "The Emperor's New Clothes," two 
rogues offer to weave for his majesty a suit of extra- 
ordinary beauty, which, however, will be invisible to 
all who are stupid and to all who are unfit to hold their 
present offices. The sharpers are awarded the contract 
and set to work with nimble fingers pretending to 
weave a fictitious fabric on empty looms. Courtiers 
and high officials visit the weavers and see nothing, 



REENFORCEMENTS 281 

but dare not say so, since such a confession would prove 
them dull or unfit for office. For the same reason 
the king pretends to see and to admire the invisible fab- 
ric on the empty looms, puts on the imaginary clothes, 
and sallies forth to exhibit them amid the hypocritical 
applause and fawning enthusiasm of his courtiers. 

"But he has nothing on!" said a child, who saw him 
from its doorstep. 

Ah ! what cheers and whooping should now be echo- 
ing down the centuries, what rockets and Bengal lights 
should light up the heavens to applaud that magnifi- 
cent act of disenthrallment ! With a child's miraculous 
strength he pulled himself out of the entangling net of 
human prejudices and saw the whole fact, as Jesus did 
when he stood by the woman of Samaria. To see 
straight, to speak or write truly we have first and 
chiefly to get ourselves cleansed of the encrusted de- 
posits of other people's ideas, and of our own caked 
habits. 

" Suitably clad externally, but mentally clogged with 
a thousand irrelevant thoughts, I go to visit a friend." 1 
To be worthy of this friendship I must first cleanse and 
disenthrall myself by "full imaginative recall of that 
friend's life and my relation to it. This is the begin- 
ning of a "prayer before action," the preliminary puri- 
fication which tradition has so long prescribed for us. 

When one gathers himself for a leap, poises and fo- 
cuses his energies, quelling internal conflicts, banishing 

1 From an unpublished paper on Prayer, by Ella Lyman Cabot. ■ 



282 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

irrelevant twitches and tremors, he acts out a phys- 
ical analogy to the prayer before battle. He may go 
beyond analogy. A college football player earned some 
newspaper notoriety and much ridicule a few years 
ago when it became known that he was accustomed to 
pray before a match game. The idea of begging God 
to favor his team and to weaken the rival team natur- 
ally excited derision and contempt, for " Prayer that 
craves a particular commodity, anything less than all 
good, is mean and vile," 1 as Emerson says. But I know 
from team-mates of the derided player that his prayer 
was essentially like Lincoln's : " I am not trying to find 
out whether God is on our side, but whether we are on 
God's side." 

He was pulling himself together, trying to get in 
touch with the ultimate sources of his strength, and, 
not being unduly influenced by the modern fad of 
atheism, he naturally turned to God. 

But it is with the disenthrallment which initiates the 
prayer before action, and all other prayers, that I am 
just now concerned. If you make a failure of your visit 
to the friend from whom you have been separated for 
months, if you fill up the precious minutes with chat 
about superficialities which neither of you wants to 
recall, and if you leave untouched the deeper or more 
fruitful interests in which your friendship has been 
built up, it is usually because there has been no 
preliminary cleansing of the surface of your mind 

1 Emerson's Essays, First Series, Riverside Edition, p. 76. 



REINFORCEMENTS 283 

where are accumulated all sorts of riff-raff, news and 
happenings, gossip and comment, which have stuck 
there from your miscellaneous contacts with uninvited 
experience. 

These clogging impurities confuse you like the thick- 
ets in which the woodsman loses his wa^. Your mind 
must be free of them before it can see its course. Such 
disenthrallment is essential in attempts to rid ourselves 
of the curse of- indecision. All prayers for direction 
spring, I suppose, out of the misery of indecision. 
Opposite courses of action are balanced evenly ; we are 
drawn to each and repelled from each. A classical in- 
stance is Emerson's doubt about leaving the ministry. 
There were no heretic hunters on his trail. The pres- 
sure was all directed toward inducing him to stay. 
Only his own conscience urged his breaking away from 
the church whose traditions he loved; he was by no 
means certain that his scruples (about his fitness to 
perform the rite of the Lord's Supper) were of import- 
ance. He dropped his work and went to the mountains 
to find help in his indecision. I do not know that he 
prayed. What interests me now is his act of disenthrall- 
ment, his decision to put distance and new surround- 
ings between himself and the tangled situation. He 
wanted a fresh view from a height ; he got it, came back, 
and resigned his pastorate. 

I have strung together these familiar experiences of 
spiritual fatigue, of mountain-top views, nautical ob- 
servations, stock-taking, re-collecting our scattered 



284 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

selves, and of disenthrallment in the pause before de- 
cisive action, because I want to show that we are again 
and again in a state of mind close to the shores of prayer. 
We usually sheer off, it is true; but it would be just as 
natural to land, and just as common, were it not that 
modern fashions and modern education have made us 
half unconsciously dislike the sensation of touching this 
firm ground. Disenthrallment, for which Lincoln ap- 
pealed to the nation in the early threatening months of 
the Civil War, is an attempt to go back to first prin- 
ciples, to free ourselves of prejudices which check grow- 
ing insight into a new situation. It is perhaps the most 
important of the approaches to prayer, and I want to 
illustrate it further. 

We often say to each other that the person who has 
lost, or never acquired, the capacity for wonder ; is 
bound to dry up. Premature senility is always threat- 
ening him if his mind cannot rest in admiration. If 
he cannot surrender himself to pure wonder in the pres- 
ence of a child, a crystal, a skyscraper, a starry night, 
or a leaping salmon, he does not get that bath of spirit- 
ual refreshment which keeps us young. Wonder rejuv- 
enates us first because it floats off the load of respon- 
sibility; for the moment it washes the mind clean of 
all thoughts, good and bad, sad or pleasing. Thereby 
wonder brings our ordinary mental life to a standstill. 
It makes one stop talking ("struck dumb with aston- 
ishment") and even suspends the ordinary uses of 



REENFORCEMENTS 285 

thought. The mind comes to rest without going to 
sleep. It draws in its strained projects, recalls the scat- 
tered flocks of thought, and rounds itself up like the 
resting amoeba. The soul stares as the eye stares, and 
stands stock-still like the body. 

But wonder, with its disconcerting and arresting 
mystery, disconnects us as well. To be rapt in amaze- 
ment means by derivation to be snatched out of the 
orderly or disorderly sequence of our ordinary behavior. 
In our amazement we no longer notice what else be- 
sides the wonderful apparition is around us. We are 
deaf and blind as well as dumb. This quenching and 
isolation of the soul is but half, the negative half, of 
wonder. The other half is an effortless absorption in 
the marvel which is before us. We see, hear, and re- 
member what astonishes us; it stamps itself photo- 
graphically upon us. Then, freed from ourselves and 
our ordinary thought-harness, we dive into the heart 
of something better. 

Wonder does not always lead to prayer; it may 
lead to stupefaction. I suppose we can waste as much 
time in watching a child as in any other way. Our 
wondering gaze may degenerate into automatic and 
fruitless staring. -Like all disenthralled states, like all 
prayer and worship, it is to be judged by its results. 
Refreshment, new plans of action, more energy, more 
adaptability, more sympathy, should issue from the 
momentary monastic retreat into which wonder 
tempts us. Wonder at a child makes for mental sound- 



286 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

ness and vigor, because it may shock us out of our 
"anxious consistency" with our previous little ideas 
about children. But it may simply suspend all mental 
progress and leave us drifting and swinging in vacancy, 
as boys swing on a gate, half hypnotized by the motion. 
For wonder, like beauty, is a gate that we are not meant 
to swing on. We are to open it and pass through into 
prayer or into action. 

The danger that wonder may degenerate into "mere 
wondering" is parallel to the risks of sestheticism. The 
average man believes by instinct that there is some- 
thing of namby-pamby in the career of any one who 
devotes himself to beauty. This is a healthy instinct. 
For the disenthrallment which beauty achieves for 
us ought to be brief and brilliant, a "cool silver shock 
of the pool's living water" which sends us bouncing 
back to some definite task. While it lasts, neverthe- 
less, beauty ought to be one of our surest and swiftest 
aids to disenthrallment, to worship, and through them 
to action.. 

I have already tried to describe the miraculous power 
of beauty and affection to whirl us about, turning our 
backs to the working world, and directing our delighted 
eyes to a vista of refreshment. In that vista I cannot 
tell where love and recreation cease and worship begins, 
for I do not believe that the man most conscious that 
he is praying is always the most prayerful. But when- 
ever we begin to recognize that our "beholding and 



REINFORCEMENTS 287 

jubilant soul" is directly continuous with the Soul of 
the Universe, we have begun to worship. 

That saturation with beauty brings us nearer to 
prayer has been instinctively realized in planning the 
outlook, the architecture, the decoration, the music, 
and incense of many, churches. But our perception of 
this analogy and our consequent recoil from the bar- 
renness of our grandfather's " meeting-house" has 
made us forget that there are types of beauty that do 
not promote worship at all. Operatic and amorous 
music is often sung in churches in a style fit to secular- 
ize and suppress any movement towards prayer. 

I have given up trying to believe that in sorrow and 
failure we can always find blessings disguised. I now 
think that such blows may contract, harden, even 
crush, a soul until it has, so far as we can see, no power 
to react. Just as beauty, and even love, may spoil a 
child by soothing it into a lackadaisical and flabby 
acquiescence, so frustration, and disappointment, 
though they brace and stimulate some of us, cer- 
tainly seem to hammer the life out of others. Yet, 
though I do not believe that it is always a good thing 
to be balked and thrown back upon ourselves, I can- 
not doubt that it may be just what we need. It de- 
pends on what else there is in the sufferer and around 
him. 

But whether the final outcome of sorrow and failure 
is good or bad, their immediate effect is certainly to 



288 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

pull us up short. "No farther now in that direction," 
they say to us. "Give us these hopes, shut that desk, 
lay down those tools." One of the results of this ar- 
rest is to make us look ourselves squarely in the face, 
and a rueful sight it is for most of us ! We are eager to 
recommend such a mirror to others, but rarely feel the 
need of it ourselves. Even if we do feel the need, we 
may be incapable of turning to face it. Then ill-fortune 
takes us by the shoulders and twitches us about with a 
whirl that has all the suddenness and externality of 
the revolution wrought by beauty. Despite the agony 
and wasted effort by the way, such a revolution may be 
salvation. For to array one self against another in 
bitter civil war may be the only discoverable way of 
saving both. We rarely do any thinking unless we 
have to ; one of the forces which most often knocks us 
out of self-contentment in a round of conventional or 
unconventional habits, is misfortune. When forced 
to reflect and be reflected, I may be driven to ask, 
"What am I here for?" "What have I been doing?" 
Then I touch the solid ground of repentance, near to 
prayer. 

"When half -gods go, the gods arrive." Thinking is 
not worship, but if it is initiated by a wrench of sorrow 
which banishes the half -gods of our superficial existence, 
God may appear. That is why we need the wrench. 

In some of us the difference between serious thinking 
and prayer is the difference between half speed and 
full speed. Thinking plus agonized questioning of the 



REENFORCEMENTS 289 

scheme of things which has rolled me in the dust, has 
not the confident appeal of the believer to his God ; 
but if it is serious it will probably come to that. 

I have tried to picture disenthrallment, the initial 
stage of worship, springing from experiences of recol- 
lection, of danger and decisive action, of wonder, 
beauty, sorrow, and failure. I have still to write of 
joy and success as disenthrallments. 

"A man of average capacity never feels so small as 
when people tell him that he is great," said Professor 
G. H. Palmer, after listening to a torrent of eulogy at 
the dinner celebrating his fortieth year as a Harvard 
teacher. Joy and success tell us that we are great. We 
may be foolish enough to believe it ; but sometimes we 
are plunged into humiliation by the staring contrast 
between our 'own insignificance and the splendor of 
the opportunity with which happiness crowns us. One 
looks so paltry and mean under a crown fit for a demi- 
god. I lifted a six-year-old girl off an electric car the 
other day because her father had the baby in his arms. 
She did not distinguish me from the machinery of the 
car till she had reached the sidewalk and got a grip of 
her father's hand. Then she turned and sent after me a 
flash of smiling recognition that made me feel like the 
tinker who was carried to the king's palace while asleep, 
dressed in magnificent clothes, and saluted as prince 
when he awoke. 

So she saluted me, whom she had never seen before, 



290 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

and her look almost crushed me beneath the weight of 
honor, blessed but painfully undeserved. Such a min- 
gling of abasement and exaltation gives one for , the mo- 
ment a new heaven and a new earth. Familiar objects 
look strange and new, old problems soluble. We are 
in Lincoln's phrase disenthralled, — free for the instant 
to see truly, as Hans Christian Andersen's little boy 
saw the truth. But every bit of pure truth has in it 
the quality and aroma of the whole, wherein honor, hu- 
mor and pathos, victory, pain, and defeat are wonder- 
fully mingled. Linked with that perception of our own 
littleness which is pressed home upon us in any mo- 
ment of entrancing joy, is the contrasted majesty and 
beneficence of the universe. We could not feel so small 
and at the same time so richly blessed, unless we felt 
that we are placed, given a home in the world. The 
spiritual essentials, are for an instant clearly isolated by 
the experience of disenthrallment ; and whatever gives 
us clear sight of these brings us close to worship. 

Before battle and before any action which we are 
alert enough to perceive as decisive, there is a natural 
impulse to pull ourselves together and look over past 
and future with an ingathering sweep which prepares 
us for prayer. I suppose that many a man who has 
rarely tried to pray at other times finds himself groping 
in that direction when the sense of impending action 
descends upon him. Responsibility and danger are 
closely linked in their power to turn us toward the 



REINFORCEMENTS 291 

Eternal, to make us "theotropic." Any responsibility 
vividly felt, calls the risk of failure to our minds and at 
the same time centers those risks around our own de- 
cisive action. We see how small is our ingenuity com- 
pared with the incalculable chances of disaster. But we 
also see that just here and now the universe has put it 
"up to us." 

Like other prayer-compelling forces, responsibility is 
always close to us. Opportunity is always now or never 
for us, and every day is Judgment Day. But what- 
ever makes us feel this afresh — appointment to office, 
marriage, parenthood — gives us a simplicity at once 
humble and bold, disentangles us from the trees and 
lets us see the forest. To find these nodal points of 
concentrated insight and recollection is also vital to 
the growth of friendship, and it is in this sense that 
prayer is as valuable before a visit as before a battle. 

As an axe-blow upon a tree, shaking the ground in 
which it is rooted, shivers through the entire globe 
and out through every part of the universe, so any act 
spreads outward through a network of endless con- 
sequences. Responsibility is my thread of connection 
with this infinite labyrinth. I should be mad if I at- 
tempted to follow it to an end. But worse than mad- 
ness is the spiritual near-sightedness which leads us to 
think, feel, and work as if we had no such connections 
with the infinite. Such short-sightedness is a species of 
insanity perhaps more widespread than any other. To 
go as far as we can into the network of thoughts re- 



292 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

suiting from any thought or of consequences following 
any act, and then to see that our part permeates and 
is permeated by the whole life of the universe, is the 
path of practical wisdom, of spiritual hygiene, but also 
of worship. For there is that in every thought and act 
which tells us all we need to know of the whole uni- 
verse, just as any foot of space and any minute of time 
stands for the whole and mirrors its nature. 

Is this still disenthrallment? From our workaday 
associations, yes. To be launched in responsibility 
brings us into wider and deeper connections by snapping 
the narrower ones. We withdraw from people, from 
work, and from all the half -gods of ordinary existence, 
into a solitude wherein we can be sincere. 

Many of us put on for company an artificial manner, 
a forced expression or a " society smile." This mask 
need not be false or fraudulent in the ordinary sense. 
It may be only the expression of that decent self-re- 
spect which makes us stand erect instead of slouching, 
or dress ourselves properly before appearing in public. 
Yet propriety is a mask which may hide us from our- 
selves, if it becomes habitual. We forget to take off our 
"society" thoughts with our " society" clothes. The 
habit of keeping up with the moods and demands of 
the others may dampen and finally quench the desire 
to be sincere with ourselves. It may keep us from 
asking ultimate questions or entertaining ultimate 
doubts. 



REINFORCEMENTS 293 

Furthermore, all moral effort involves the kind of 
pretense which I have already described as " impersona- 
tion." Long before they fit us we have to take up the 
responsibilities and put on the manners of adult life, 
of bread-winning, parenthood, salaried work, truth- 
telling, and chastity. We have to act as if we were fit 
and competent in order to make ourselves so. We have 
to assume a virtue when we have it not and thus pain- 
fully to acquire it. This is as it should be, but sooner 
or later the accumulated fatigue of impersonation, the 
heat and weight of our moral costume, grow oppres- 
sive, and should be thrown off, like any other fatiguing 
burden. To strip away the disguises of moral strenuous- 
ness and of social compliance as the actor plucks off his 
wig in the greenroom may lead only to moral laxity or 
to sleep ; yet it is through this same gate that we must 
pass to that solitude and ultimate sincerity which is 
one of the approaches to prayer. For our best as well 
as our worst may be buried under the disguises of 
moral and social effort. 

Woe to the man who cannot stop acting ; who makes 
no difference between stage and greenroom, and who 
is afraid of solitude! Mob-contagion, the automatic 
registration and reproduction of actions which no one 
starts but all transmit, needs no crowd. Two or three 
can create it, spread it and magically transform each 
other into helpless puppets, dangling on strings and 
twitched by the dread hand of Nobody -in-particular. 
Lowered on our wires to such a marionette stage we 



294 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

surely "descend to meet," as Emerson said, for any 
value that there is in us splits into a hodge-podge of 
gregariousness. 

Make this state of things bad enough, and with the 
instinct of self-preservation we react ; we feel a salutary 
hunger for solitude and renewal. Unfortunately this 
reaction may not be fierce enough to carry us farther 
than unabashed hygiene prescribes. We retreat to the 
mountains, the sea, or the country. We "go abroad" 
in search of health, distraction, or "art," and unfortu- 
nately we often partially succeed. These palliative 
remedies may so far satisfy us that we fail to retreat 
into ourselves. We do not burrow back to our origins ; 
we reach no original and life-saving insight. We stop 
on this side of prayer. 

A dread of solitude is often partially responsible for 
the abortiveness of this recoil toward prayer. We hear 
of solitude most often nowadays in connection with 
vice or imprisonment. The dangers and the abuses 
of solitude are uppermost in our minds. And solitude 
in its literal sense, which we do not often face, is really 
hell. If in solitude you meet no fresh thoughts which 
lead you back to the sources of healing and forgiveness, 
if instead you meet only the tortures of helpless lone- 
liness, then solitude is your worst foe. But in the popu- 
lous solitude of disenthrallment, the noises which drown 
God's voice are stilled. 



REINFORCEMENTS 295 

While describing the aids and approaches to worship 
I have ignored some that have proved historically 
most helpful ; I mean the reinforcements of association 
in churches and church ceremonies. Crowd-contagion, 
as I have just sketched its evil influence, is headless 
and blind. It leads to monarchy or to murder; it exalts 
or destroys a man or an institution, with as little in- 
tention as an earthquake or a drought. 

But in church we see the possibility of directing and 
marshaling the gregarious impulses of mankind so as 
to concentrate and reenforce our theotropic power. The 
forces that make soldiers steadier and bolder when 
they can touch shoulders, may also magnify in every 
member of a congregation the timorous impulse toward 
worship. For the crowd is not simply gathered to- 
gether, but gathered together in the name of Christ, 
under the leadership and unifying influence of a revered 
personality. 

Many who feel gauche or irritable in church can 
share the enthusiastic church-member's experiences by 
recalling a college commencement or the meetings of 
some professional society or political club pervaded 
by a genuine instinct of membership. I believe that 
many college graduates get their nearest approach to 
the experience of public worship in the surging feelings 
of devotion and loyalty called out by Commencement 
songs, exercises, and speeches. Few of us go to Com- 
mencement as a duty ; we take the day as a privilege 
and an opportunity. We forget for a day the claims of 



296 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

naked utility and the restraints of self-consciousness. 
There is aroused in us a powerful emotion of gratitude 
and loyalty to an institution, very little of which is 
visible or tangible. It is genuinely a spirit to which the 
graduates are loyal, a college spirit to which they con- 
tribute and from which they draw new inspiration for 
the coming year. They have funded there their best 
ideals for the country and for young Americans. Yet 
they do not feel that they have made or invented the 
spirit of this institution as skeptics say men invent 
God. They were born in it, nourished by it, and love 
to think of its permanence through past and future, 
through civil war and through the passing crazes of 
the time. 

This is the spirit in which we ought to go to church, 
if we go at all, because we love it and find there our 
chance for service and for refreshment, a renewing of 
tarnished standards, an outlet for reverence and aspira- 
tion. All this men do find in Commencement Day, and 
that day is therefore the nearest approach that many 
of them ever find to worship. Some results of worship, 
the reinforcement of loyalty, devotion, and self-abase- 
ment, one certainly does achieve in these half-secular 
gatherings for the praise of an institution. 

By incorporeal aid, as well as by visible comrades, 
we rise above our common level, both in church and in 
non-ecclesiastical gatherings. We are companioned by 
the many-colored memories of former gatherings, 
what is left to us and what is gone, what has leaped up 



REENFORCEMENTS 297 

anew in us and what has changed almost beyond re- 
cognition ; all re enforce and renew the sacredness of the 
experience. We feel the unseen presence and the instant 
sympathy of many who have sat or knelt beside us in 
troublous or in jubilant days long past, u als knieten 
viele ungesehen und beteten mit mir." 



CHAPTER XXXII 

CONFESSION: PETITION: PRAISE 

When a child wakes in the grip of a nightmare, sobs 
and stammers it out to his mother, and finds that its 
horrors have swiftly vanished, he has discovered the 
value of confession. Through expression something 
confused and inarticulate has lost its terrors. By con- 
fession he marshals his troubles in consciousness and 
spreads them out in form and order; thus he gains 
command of them and of himself. 

Confession in more or less secular forms, confession 
to a doctor or a chum, gives some relief to the tortures 
of internal strife, — duplicity and fraud, the burden of 
lies, thefts, treachery, or concealment, or, it may be, 
the more subtle duplicity of warring ideals, curiosities, 
and doubts. In any case we seek instinctively through 
confession some inner peace or at least some truce to 
inner war. We make these secular confessions primarily 
because we cannot hold in any longer. We confess 
not so much because murder will out, but rather be- 
cause the tension between what we are and what we 
seem has grown intolerable. 

An interesting variety of confession, rediscovered 
and reapplied by the German neurologist S. Freud, 
forms part of his "psycho-analytic" treatment of 
functional nervous disorders. People suppress and try 



CONFESSION: PETITION: PRAISE 299 

to bury a disappointed hope or an evil desire; but ac- 
cidentally they bury it alive, so that it struggles and 
shrieks beneath the weight of daily life piled on top of 
it. This is, I think, the essence of the Freudian doc- 
trine. Now and then the struggles of this fragment of 
buried existence shake the surface of everyday life and 
emerge in a fit of weeping or of rage. "You begin to 
cry," said a small boy of my acquaintance, "for the 
thing that made you cry, but you go on crying for all 
the sad and sorry things that ever happened." You 
had never quite laid the ghost of these ancient sor- 
rows. From the deeper inconsequent strata of your 
existence it rises to haunt and oppress you. 

So in rage: we begin to be angry with a companion 
for some trifling annoyance, but we go on into a " fit of 
rage" because our momentary anger is reenforced by 
the renascent memories of a multitude of other in- 
juries, long half -consciously brooded, never quite for- 
given. All this submerged corruption boils up to the 
surface, sometimes with our own aid; we may work 
ourselves into a passion for the sake of the vent it gives 
to our repressed and smouldering resentment. 

A better vent is given by full confession. To see 
clearly that we are abusing our fellow for his part in 
spats which both should have forgiven and forgotten 
long ago, shames us or makes us laugh. The air is 
cleared; the ghosts of past quarrels are laid. To tempt 
the sufferer into confessing what he did not know 
enough to confess, is the substance of psycho-analysis, 



300 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

though Freud has misled many into supposing that 
all such confessions must deal with one topic, sex. 

The assisted and guided confession of half-conscious 
troubles, and the more spontaneous outpourings for 
relief of tortured and desperate memories, are of ob- 
vious value in moral hygiene. But what is their con- 
nection with worship? The answer seems to be this: 
We confess because of a hunger for soundness. ' ' What, ' ' 
we ask, "can heal the divisions of this wounded spirit? 
What shall make us whole? " It is confession. But the 
healing of one wound makes us aware of other and 
deeper suffering, and of an unsatisfied hunger for friend- 
ship, not only between the hostile parts of our own per- 
sonality, but between that personality and the social 
order which nourishes it. We claim our right and duty 
to take a man's part, not a parasite's, in the society 
around us. We want to lift our part of the load and to 
deserve some portion of the good things that come to 
us. 

But this is not enough. We are conscious — fitfully 
and in glimpses — that our deepest gratitude and serv- 
ice cannot be paid to any visible institution like the 
State, the progress of science or civilization. Behind 
these are the universe and its Spirit, which made them 
and will unmake them if they fail. Fundamentally we 
want to get down to bed-rock. We long for harmony, 
not only with the better part of our own selves, not 
only with the quite fallible and temporary institutions 
of society, but with the bottom principle of things.. 



CONFESSION: PETITION: PRAISE 301 

If we follow home the impulse, it prompts confession 
to One who knows better than we how to frame that 
confession and hears what we mean but cannot say. 

I have now described as well as I can the steps by 
which one may reach prayer in its usual and traditional 
sense, namely, petition. I shall not try to prove that 
our minds are given their nourishment and their sense 
by sharing in a Total Mind through which, as through 
an atmosphere, we speak to each other and deal with 
nature. That proof, as I believe, is abundantly sup- 
plied in other books, and lives in the deeds of all 
noble people. 

I But many who are aware of God, and try to live ac- 
cording to what they believe to be his will, still feel that 
petition is a relic of barbarous or of naive ages, some- 
thing not to be taken seriously by reasonable people. 
Prayers for rain, for victory in battle, for the recov- 
ery of the sick, — what are these but frantic attempts 
to break the laws of nature? And even if they could 
succeed, would they not be grossly selfish? For my 
victory is often another's despair. The rain which falls 
on my crops leaves my distant neighbor's all the longer 
in drought. But if we admit that ' ' all prayer that craves 
a particular commodity — anything less than all good 
— is mean and vile," do we eliminate all the prayers 
that any needy mortal wants to make? "All good" is 
a pretty large order and a tolerably vague one. 

In answer to this question, which often troubled me 



302 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

in past years, Christ's words in the garden of Geth- 
semane now seem wholly satisfying: "If it be possible 
let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless thy will, not 
mine be done." 

No one who believes in God, and thinks of duty as 
the increasing approximation to his will, can absolutely 
desire any particular commodity or immunity. Every 
wish becomes conditional and "has a string to it." 
Strange though it sounds, a conditional wish is not 
absurd or even uncommon. You want to win your foot- 
ball game, — yes, but you don't want to win by any 
means or unconditionally. You want to win if you 
can do so under the rules of the game and with no more 
luck than is compatible with the dominance of skill and 
science. In other words, what you want above all else 
is good sport, a well-played game, and an antagonist 
worthy of your steel. To win by a fluke, as yacht- 
races are sometimes won, to win by undetected viola- 
tion of the rules, or to win over an antagonist half your 
size, is not what you want. Your desire to win is lim- 
ited on every side. If it be possible I want victory. 
Nevertheless let the best man win. Let the traditions 
of good sport be maintained whoever wins or loses. 
If I can only win by a fluke or a fraud, then I want 
to lose and to lose well. 

A scientific investigator wants his experiment to 
succeed ; he wants to be known and promoted through 
success. He is looking, perhaps, for a cancer cure. But 
if it turns out that he is looking in the wrong place, 



CONFESSION: PETITION: PRAISE 303 

he wants nature to tell him so decisively. He wants no 
fame and promotion that are based on a fluke or a 
misunderstanding. He would rather fail and waste the 
time and money which he has spent on his research 
than publish as fact any "may be." Behind his intense 
desire, there is for him, as there was for Christ, a "never- 
theless." 

Any high-minded man wants prosperity for his party, 
his nation, his race, or his cause. But he wants it con- 
ditionally. The "rules of the game" still govern him. 
If his nation can survive only by sucking the vitality of 
other struggling nations, then he wants his nation to go 
down. Our devotion to any cause becomes conditional 
as soon as by sympathy and foresight we see that 
our cause can only win by breaking the rules of the 
game. 

Whoever, by religious instinct or religious philos- 
ophy, has come to believe that the universe is a team 
of which he is a member, wants the success of the team 
unconditionally and with his whole heart, and wants 
nothing else, save with the condition, "provided this 
does not contravene the needs of the team," Such is 
the spirit of Christ's prayer. Obviously, then, condi- 
tional wishing is part of our daily exercise. The baby- 
ish tendency to "want what you want when you want 
it" is squelched or modified in every piece of concerted 
work, in every advance of science, and every harmoni- 
ous family. To revise and subordinate our wills until 
they are conditional on the success of a city, a party, or 



304 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

any other team to which we are loyal, is among the most 
familiar and unheroic necessities of civilized life. 

We take the further step, from loyal team-work in 
business, science, or politics, to world-loyalty whenever 
we realize that we are part of the world and not merely 
part of our own town. When one is driven by the ne- 
cessities of thought or drawn by some swifter process to 
recognize the living universe beyond the city limits, 
one has no longer any absolute desire except that the 
Will expressed in that universe shall prevail. This 
desire is the perpetual though often half-hearted prayer, 
"Thy will be done." My own conditional will is not 
wiped out, unless it hopelessly conflicts with itself, 
i.e., with my unconditional will for the success of the 
universe. Loyal citizenship is thus one of the approaches 
to religious loyalty and to prayer. 

Since we are so bound together that we must succeed 
or fail together, each at bottom wants each of the rest 
to succeed in his own way, so far as he can find it. For 
the same reason, each nation not too blind to see the 
facts, is interested in the national success of the whole 
family of nations. To crush out a single nation or a 
single will is to weaken the world- team. 

Whoever "craves a particular commodity," uncon- 
ditionally and without consulting, as well as he can, the 
interests of all concerned, is not praying. Before 
prayer he must confront his desire first with all the 
visible objections to see if they can be harmonized with 
it. Then finally in prayer he binds himself, absolutely 



CONFESSION: PETITION: PRAISE 305 

and in advance, to modify or wipe out his will so far as 
this may be necessary in order to meet any objections 
now unknown to him and so to harmonize it with the 
Will of the Whole. 

Any one who sincerely wants the truth, even when it 
wrecks his other desires, is in the attitude of prayer. 
If a man is sincere when he asks you to tell him the 
truth about his fitness for a certain office, he will take 
his medicine, even though the verdict is "utterly un- 
fit." On the whole, all things considered, he does not 
any longer want the office, since he is unfit. 

But it takes time and struggle to get to this point. 
It is hard to squelch the rampant energies which tell 
him to grab the office anyway, to get the honor and 
profit of it and cover up the traces of his unfitness. 
All sorts of sophistries rise up in him to defend his will 
against his Will. "Some one equally unfit will get the 
office if I don't. I need the money for my children's 
education. Surely I must n't neglect my family." To 
struggle against these sophistries is the struggle of 
prayer. For the sincerest people may be unwilling to 
ask advice of any living man in such a dilemma. They 
fight the problem out "alone," seeking the truth in the 
presence and before the tribunal of the best they know. 
If there is a genuine fight, if the man's native desire for 
the place is given a fair hearing, not simply brushed 
aside without consideration, and if the judge is not in 
the pay of native desire itself, but is chosen because 
he represents the squarest judgment available, then 



306 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

something very like prayer is going on whether the 
name of God is mentioned or not. 

If he is sincere he means to find the Truth, or the 
nearest available approach to it, and to correct his 
decision as often as new light appears. This desire, 
like all desires to find the 'solid fact or the True Course 
of action, is really an infinite desire. The presence of 
such an infinite desire judging our finite cravings is the 
presence of God in our prayer. 

Petition, then, is not a mean whimpering for favors; 
it is the only honorable and manly act for any one in 
doubt about his belief or his course of action. All 
straight thinking means asking for the truth and get- 
ting the best answer that we can find. Petition is merely 
one expression of sincerity and of clearness in thought. 

There is a superficial resemblance between condi- 
tional wishing and a cowardly or a fatalistic submis- 
sion to whatever comes, just as' there is a certain like- 
ness between humility and the slimy "umbleness" of 
Uriah Heep. Sincerity is the touchstone which decides. 
If you sincerely want a true judgment about the worth 
of your desire for office, you will give fair consideration 
to the possibility that despite all your sins and limita- 
tions you may really deserve that office yourself. Your 
crude desire may be wholly right. You do not intend 
always to duck your head to others, nor to crush and 
forget your desires by keeping busy about something 
else, nor to avoid the responsibilities and reproaches 
of taking the best berth in sight. You want to be fair 



CONFESSION: PETITION: PRAISE 307 

to your own elemental cravings as well as to the claims 
of other people. Hence prayer does not always mean 
renunciation. It means perpetual readiness either for 
victory or for renunciation, whichever is the verdict 
of the best judgment in sight. 

So far as we achieve this readiness, we achieve as deep 
a peace as any human being has a right to. We are on 
more solid ground than when we simply hustled along 
and tried to forget our desires for the much coveted or 
the apparently unattainable. For desires controlled 
only by the pressure of work and concentration spring 
up again when that pressure slackens. Even while we 
are working they color our outlook and tend to make us 
sour, or at best merely stoical. After facing a desire 
with the best wisdom which we can reach, after thinking 
it through with absolute sincerity, which is the presence 
of God, we can begin to work again whole-heartedly 
because there are no longer any rebels in camp. We 
have expelled both the doubts about our right to success 
and the sullen misgivings about the need of our renoun- 
cing it. 

Such decisions cannot often be made once for all. 
They drag along indefinitely. In every wide-awake 
person I think there must be such trials, prolonged for 
years because the evidence is not all in. It may take one 
a long time to make sure that he is in the right pro- 
fession, or to decide whether he ought to give up all for 
a cause. Here "the readiness is all," — the readiness 
to change just as soon as the evidence is sufficient to 



308 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

demand a change, and the equal readinessjto keep on 
waiting and hunting for new light until sincerely con- 
vinced, or until it is clear that further indecision is in 
itself a decision and the wrong one. Meantime we play 
the game under the rules for all that it is worth. 

This is, I suppose, one of the meanings in St. Paul's 
phrase, "Pray without ceasing.' ' 

What about prayers for others? One may agree that 
there is petition in all good thinking, and petition to the 
Absolute Spirit by all who aspire in the spirit of abso- 
lute sincerity. But when we pray for another's safety 
or success, are we not asking for a change in the laws of 
nature? When President McKinley was sick, it cer- 
tainly seemed as if some prayed for him with a gam- 
bler's superstition that it could n't do any harm and 
might do good. Is not this to play fast and loose with 
sacred things? 

Again Christ's words set us straight. " If it be pos- 
sible let this cup pass from me," — or from him, we can 
say with equal right, if we add as all Christians must : 
1 ' Nevertheless thy will, not mine be done. ' ' Our friends, 
if we love them, make up so large a part of ourselves that 
our desires include them. Such desires, like all others, 
are crude and need to be purified in the fire of the 
thought of God. Prayer is, then, a struggle for mutual 
accommodation between one of my desires and the 
Judge of all my desires, a struggle born of our need to 
live at peace together. Can I think of any way of help- 



CONFESSION: PETITION: PRAISE 309 

ing my friend in his trouble without making matters 
worse, without neglecting prior claims? If not, I can 
at any rate drive out panicky impulses to despair and 
curse ; for if before God I clearly picture the situation 
and my friend in it, these childish tendencies drop 
away. 

In a crude and vague form, something that is akin to 
the praise of God celebrated in hymns and church ser- 
vices, often breaks out in the midst of rejoicings over 
college victories, success in politics, love, or war, and 
especially in the presence of overwhelming natural 
beauty. But such jubilations are often formless and 
thoughtless. Even in Emerson's magnificent definition 
of worship as the "soliloquy of a beholding and jubi- 
lant soul," the jubilant soul appears a little indefinite. 
It does not seem to know quite what it is rejoicing about. 
Somehow its gratitude and exultation spread beyond 
the event or spectacle in the foreground, to "every- 
thing else." It is not merely that 

"Morning's at seven, 
The hillside's dew-pearled "; 

but that, moreover, 

" God 's in his heaven, 
All's right with the world." 

There is the same vagueness in the enthusiasm of 
people who sing hymns with real fervor, but do not 
notice the meaning of the words, or, if they do, are 
repelled. Yet I believe that the religious sentiment 



310 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

intended by the composer of the hymn does reach many 
who sing it in this vague way. 

The weakness of such enthusiasms is that they for- 
get for the time the blind cruelties of nature, the un- 
deserved sufferings of children, the famines, the prisons, 
and the insane asylums. To deserve the name of wor- 
ship and the praise of God, our enthusiasm must be 
such as to remember, include, and surmount these 
evils. This requirement is hard to fulfill and must 
compel most of us to confess that we know very little of 
such experiences. James Russell Lowell counts but 
three in his lifetime, and somehow we resent his arith- 
metic because it seems that so great an experience 
ought to change the color and texture of one's life so 
radically that another such experience would be as in- 
commensurable with the first as odors are incommen- 
surable with mathematical equations. 

I have nothing of my own to report here, though I 
think the experiences of exaltation and gratitude which 
have come to me, as to thousands, in -the hymns and 
liturgies of the Christian Church are somewhat more 
definitely religious than the expansive enthusiasm for 
things in general which springs out of us after a plunge 
of ecstatic delight in art, nature, love, or victory. But 
any one who has been carried away from his usual moor- 
ings by a wave of intense gratitude for opportunity, 
for human nobility, or for beauty, must have noticed 
the painful internal pressure of the desire to repay some 
one while at the same instant the impossibility of ade- 



CONFESSION: PETITION: PRAISE 311 

quately repaying any one stares him in the face. Some- 
thing has to give way when an irresistible force meets 
anything less than an immovable body. We should be 
torn to pieces or made silly by the effort to express our 
endless gratitude, or to spend it on some finite object, 
were we not dimly or clearly aware that benefits re- 
ceived from any one of God's creatures can be repaid 
to any or all of the others. Indirectly through them, 
directly through the praise of God, we can utter in 
infinite time the full force of our gratitude. What I 
owe to A, I can repay to some extent through love and 
service to B, C, and D. But how can I get even with 
the rainbow? What can express the torrent of thank- 
fulness I feel to Christ? Worship is the only answer. 
Through worship the stored residue of our unexpended 
gratitude, all we could never pay, all men ignored when 
we tried to pay it, flows straight or deviously back to 
God, who sees the whole. 

By tracing out the full meaning of gratitude, I believe 
one might trace the full outline of belief in God and in 
immortality. For gratitude, like love, is by birth and 
lineage an infinite emotion, satisfied with no finite ser- 
vice or praise, exhausted by no measure of effort and 
expression. It implies an infinite object and an infinite 
life as one end of a stick implies another. Meantime 
inarticulate gratitude is tolerable only because we are 
aware, vaguely or less vaguely, that some one under- 
stands and receives what we cannot express in word or 
deed. Without that awareness gratitude would be like 



312? WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

a wild beast in our breasts. In worship or the praise 
of the Almighty and All-comprehending Spirit contin- 
uous with ours, we conquer at last our inarticulateness 
and are relieved for the time of our burden. 

By overflowing enthusiasm and by gratitude, then, 
we are enticed near to the shores of prayer, and no 
human being can ever deny to another the right to 
believe that in some moment of joy and thanksgiving 
he has actually landed and knelt. 

Reverence is a familiar and manly emotion and few 
are ashamed to confess it ; yet it stops this side of wor- 
ship only when it is too shy and timid to recognize its 
own thinly disguised meaning. Take it for a moment 
from the other fellow's point of view. No one can stand 
reverence paid to himself or fail to see that the billet 
is addressed to some one else and by a most lovable 
blunder delivered at the wrong house. 

"Farther up the same road — in fact an infinite dis- 
tance from here," one must call out to the messenger. 
"Your direction is all right, and I know the Person 
whom you are after, in fact I am a poor relation of his, 
but He does n't live here." 

Yet we reverence others. Can we, then, go on pur- 
posely paying unto others that which we know could 
never conceivably be paid to ourselves without blas- 
phemy? Every one of us knows that no amount of 
added virtue or subtracted sin would make him fit to 
receive reverence. For the trouble is not with our par- 
ticular incapacity and littleness, but with the inherent 



CONFESSION: PETITION: PRAISE 313 

unfitness of any finite being to contain the outpourings 
of an infinite impulse. We must pass it along as we do 
gratitude expressed to ourselves ; we pass it to others so 
far as we can, but chiefly and most directly to God. 

Any of us not wholly devoid of modesty and curiosity 
must sometimes have been set to wondering at the pro- 
fusion of valuable goods which nature leaves at our 
door, obviously not meant for us. How disorderly and 
capricious, it seems, on nature's part! How humiliating 
and embarrassing for us to find at the breakfast-table 
a crown we are quite incapable of wearing, to find in the 
sunset a poem we cannot read, to have gratitude given 
us in a smile for work we never performed. Rewards 
fifty sizes too large for us, five hundred times greater 
than what we bought and paid for, are delivered to 
us daily. 

That sunset, that magnificent thunderstorm, What 
are they really meant for? Whom or what do they help 
in the struggle for existence? They were there before 
man came on earth. They surely do not fit me; they 
humiliate and overwhelm me. They are meant for 
some one else, yet I, too, understand a bit of them. They 
are not addressed to any being who contradicts my 
aspirations. 

I say that they are aimed, like all reverence, toward 
God. They hit you and me on the way, because we are 
on the path to Him. 






CHAPTER XXXIII 

COMMUNION: THE ANSWER TO PRAYER: SUMMARY 

The gaucherie and shamefacedness, the scorn or re- 
volt of the up-to-date man invited to take part in wor- 
ship, reaches a climax when we approach communion. 
Rapture, ecstasy, and the mystic states associated 
with them, are to the minds of most of us either the 
fakes and hysteria of "mediums" or the fanaticism of 
dancing dervishes. Part of this instinctive discredit is 
due to our distrust of emotionalism and all that goes 
with it. Good citizens are alarmed at the idea of being 
"carried away" by music, acting, athletics, politics, 
religion, or anything else. "When was Lincoln ever 
carried away?" they will ask you. "Didn't he chew 
his straw, smile or frown a little, tell a story or two, 
and maintain his steady composure throughout all the 
crises of his maturer life?" 

I do not know how far this tradition does justice to 
Lincoln, but in any case I think it represents a trun- 
cated ideal of a man. The person who cannot be "car- 
ried away" by any music is to be pitied, not admired, 
on that account. He probably lacks a musical ear or 
an acquaintance with the human experience which 
music portrays. He is blighted and numb like one who 
cannot fall in love. But if one is more fortunately 
endowed on the emotional side and has never become 



COMMUNION: ANSWER TO PRAYER 315 

sour and blase, then he can be rapt and entranced by 
art as much as any devotee by religion. He will look 
as ridiculous and behave as unsocially as a dervish ; or 
he may look utterly passive and dreamy, although in 
truth his outward ''passivity" is a mask concealing 
intense activity, "like the motionlessness of the rapid 
wheel or the ease and silence of light." l 

Any one who cares for music is able to follow sym- 
pathetically, even if he cannot share, the accounts of 
the religious experience called "communion with God." 
He knows what is meant by an intense but "effortless 
attention." It is a concentrated mental activity com- 
prehending a multitude of present facts without drop- 
ping stitches by the way, coursing over wide realms of 
memory and anticipation as people do when in great 
and sudden danger. In this conspectus, one gets be- 
yond trying ; one wakes to an experience that is not less 
but more definite than our ordinary consciousness. 

Of course such states of entrancement are justified 
only by their results. Partial intoxication with ether 
or nitrous oxide gas produces moods which feel much the 
same as religious ecstasy ; but they differ in that they 
have no beneficial or lasting effects, t If we do not reap 
new explanations, new clews to action, new powers of 
self-devotion and self-control, new appreciation of 
others' strength and of our own weakness, then our 
worship has been fruitless ; in the end it may degener- 
ate into self-indulgence, a wallowing in emotion for 
1 Hocking, p. 384. 



3i6 



WHAT MEN LIVE BY 



emotion's sake or a slavish engrossment in details of 
habitual rite. 



Though nothing can be plainer or more terrible than 
sin, the shameful and intentional violation of our own 
standards, it is now fashionable to ignore it. This will 
not do. The attempt to dilute and modify sin by call- 
ing it "unintentional mistake " or " an infraction of un- 
conventional rules" means muddleheadedness or so- 
phistry. No one loses the consciousness of sin unless 
he loses it on purpose, that is, by sinning until he has 
calloused himself. 

In prayer we seek forgiveness for our sins. But what 
can that forgiveness mean? Christ has told us to look 
for its meaning in our own struggle to forgive those who 
trespass against us. To forgive those who have wronged 
us is not to forget the injury. For some people forget- 
ting is as easy as it is inane ; for others it is impossible ; 
for all it is valueless or harmful. In forgiveness there is 
always struggle ; in forgetting there may be none. We 
struggle to regain through forgiveness our regard or 
affection despite the culpable weakness which we 
recognize. " Nevertheless " is the crucial and victorious 
word in forgiveness, as it was in Christ's prayer that 
the cup might pass from him. Our affection is not un- 
changed, but nevertheless we make a new venture of 
hope and faith. 

So Christians believe that the world-spirit gives us 
another fair chance whenever we sincerely repent of our 



COMMUNION: ANSWER TO PRAYER 317 

sins. This is a miracle like all forgiveness, for it implies 
that the laws of cause and effect are not the only fac- 
tors in the workshop where character is moulded. Ac- 
cording to the law of cause and effect we get "an eye 
for an eye and a tooth for a tooth/ ' since action and 
reaction are equal and opposite; every sin leaves an 
indelible mark not to be wiped out by repentance and 
reform. This is true as long as we deal with the arith- 
metic of finite quantities and closed circuits. A ball 
batted against the walls of a closed rectangular room 
takes mathematically predictable directions, at veloci- 
ties that depend on the rigidity of the walls, the elas- 
ticity of the ball, and the force with which it is driven. 

But by forgiveness an unmeasurable power is dis- 
covered. We may cut away virtue from character by 
sin, yet, through the infinite quality of forgiving love, 
we may have left a chance of achievement still infinite. 
A similar miracle happens when one cuts off a bit of a 
line. In the piece which has been cut away there was 
room for many points, yet in the piece which is left 
there is still an infinite opportunity to find more 
points. So for love, even for our human love, there 
are still infinite "points " to be found in a person whom 
we forgive, even though by sin some possibilities have 
been cut away. 

This miraculous fertility in the infinite resources is 
opened to us sinners only by the sincerity of our prayer 
for forgiveness, the sincerity of our repentance. For 
sincerity has in it always an infinite quality like that 



318 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

of love and reverence. It may be an absolute sincerity, 
prepared for endless trial and sacrifice. One who sin- 
cerely devotes himself to the service of truth wants 
truth at whatever cost of labor, humiliation, and re- 
form. He is prepared with an answer to all possible ob- 
jectors, however numerous, each plausibly presenting 
him as a substitute for truth something " just as good 
for less money.' ' Sincere repentance is likewise infinite 
because there is no end to its sorrow and no limitation 
to what it is ready to perform in the way of expiation. 
If to any right demand for sacrifice or humiliation a 
repentant soul can answer, "Ah, no, not that, any- 
thing but that," then his repentance is so far insincere 
and forgiveness is so far helpless. 

Absolute obedience is a virtue not highly prized in 
America to-day. But whatever be our belief as to the 
need of it in other fields, there can be no question that 
absolute forgiveness presupposes absolute obedience. 
If we are to be forgiven we must be beaten to a stand- 
still: "Lord, here am I: what wouldst thou that I 
should do?" St. Francis of Assisi attained this spirit 
and trained his followers in it. 

' ' A certain poor and infirm man came unto him. On 
whom having much compassion, St. Francis began to 
speak to one of his followers of the other's poverty and 
sickness; but his follower said to St. Francis: ' Brother, 
it is true that he seems poor enough ; but it may be that 
in this whole province there is not one who wishes more 
to be rich than he.' And being at once severely re- 



COMMUNION: ANSWER TO PRAYER 319 

proved by St. Francis he confessed his fault"; — the 
fault of uncharitably imputing sin. Then comes the test 
of true repentance. " Blessed Francis said unto him: 
' Wilt thou do for this sin the penance which I shall bid 
thee?' Who answered (in unconditional obedience), 
'I will do it willingly.' Then Francis said unto him, 
1 Go and put off thy tunic and throw thyself naked at 
the poor man's feet, and tell him how thou hast sinned 
against him in speaking evil of him in that matter and 
ask him to pray for thee.' He went, therefore, and did 
all the things which blessed Francis had told him." 

We moderns are proud to say that we owe absolute 
obedience only to our consciences, but I wonder how 
many of us possess a conscience that is quite uninflu- 
enced by a desire to be easy on the culprit whom it 
judges, a conscience that is as ready as St. Francis was 
to demand of us the expiation that really expiates? 

The forgiveness of sin is perhaps the whole of the 
answer to prayer, its all-inclusive result. For the at- 
tainment of spiritual peace, the quenching of uncer- 
tainty, the freeing of shackled powers, and all that one 
could hope to obtain through prayer, can, I suppose, 
be properly included under forgiveness. That we are as 
dull, as habit-bound, and unoriginal as we are is doubt- 
less largely our own fault. If so, the divine forgiveness 
will mean a burst of originality in thought, word, and 
deed. 

To be original, in musical composition, in scientific 



320 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

hypothesis, or in the control of one's temper is a mir- 
acle, like all novelty. Whatever is really new, is some- 
thing uncommensurable with former experiences, un- 
predictable as the face of a new baby. One veritably 
original thing each man does. He gets born, and the 
mother's assurance that there never was such a baby 
as this is literally and absolutely correct. Every birth 
is a miraculous birth, because no two individuals are 
alike, and novelty is always inexplicable. The birth of 
a new thought, a new habit, a new leaf, a new day, is 
just as miraculous, because its newness is the one thing 
that all law and all previous experience cannot explain. 

When saint or sinner asks with all his might: What 
shall I do next? What does this puzzling experience 
mean? What will best express this idea? — he is not 
reaching for a dictionary or thesaurus in which to find 
ready-made what he needs. He is reaching for the truth 
and the right. Ultimately he is reaching for God's 
help, and when his question is answered he gets all he 
can hear of the answer to prayer. 

Intense wondering, determined groping after the 
truth, seeks the new, not for novelty's sake, but be- 
cause nothing else is true to this minute's and this in- 
dividual's need. We want the new in order to save 
our lives, to save us from dying away into habits of 
vegetative existence ; to save us from petty picking and 
stealing among the trite old words and deeds which 
lumber up the world. 

In composing music to a song, if a melody doesn't 



COMMUNION: ANSWER TO PRAYER 321 

come to one ready-made, by the free and miraculous 
grace of the universe, one dives again and again for 
the pearl of sincerity. "What do those verses mean to 
me? What is the music that properly belongs with 
them?" 

But what does one dive into? In what direction does 
one stare when he is striving for the true musical ex- 
pression of a verse? Surely he is staring into the face 
of the deepest truth he knows or can reach. The verit- 
ably right phrase is the one he peers after. We are here 
vitally interested not so much in what he attains as in 
what he faces, — the infinite vista down which he 
directs the infinite longing of his gaze. Surely he is 
straining towards the Origin of all things. He is plead- 
ing with the Creator for his one mite of creativeness ! 
He is trying to prostrate himself before the Absolute 
Truth upon this theme, for that Truth is all that he 
wishes to express. 

So far as I can see, no prayer for light or strength 
does anything else than this. As one struggles in ear- 
nest talk to hear the new from one's comrade, and to 
find the accurate phrase for one's own meaning, one 
stares with the mind as intently as one fixes the muscles 
and the eyes. Then what does the eye of the mind seek 
to envisage? What else but the invisible Truth in 
which men who seek with all their heart find more than 
they deserve? 

Here, then, is another way of obedience to Paul's 
"pray without ceasing." The effort to be original 



322 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

defeats itself, but the effort to be sincere, the desire to 
say what one means without too shamefully wronging 
the beauty of the truth that one looks off to on the 
mind's horizon, is a perpetual seeking of God's pres- 
ence, a prayer ever joyfully renewed. 

Originality of thought and speech is perhaps the 
least important of the sincerities which are the goal of 
all earnestness. To brace up one's standards in any sor- 
riest corner of their tattered and disreputable substance 
is to be original, and that in the most arduous and 
honorable way. Why should n't a man stop beating 
his wife's long-suffering soul with the cudgels of his 
inconsiderateness? To be more decent to her would be 
a perfectly original work of art, doubtless hung upon 
the line in the gallery of man's humorous or pathetic 
approximations to the beauty of holiness. 

The need of worship reflects an intense weariness 
with what is old and habitual, a hunger for what is 
radically new and untried. In the pain of spiritual 
fatigue, it is the "impulse for spiritual self-preserva- 
tion," and renews the worth of life as we see it, by re- 
minding us of our ultimate Good. 

The conscious approaches to worship, like the effort 
to dispel prejudice in scientific and dispassionate judg- 
ment, are largely negative. By beauty, joy or sorrow 
or danger, we are detached from the habits and associa- 
tions which, like the shell of a crustacean, both register 
our progress and limit it. 






COMMUNION: ANSWER TO PRAYER 323 

In worship we seek to know our God by absorption 
and contagion, as we catch the spirit of a command- 
ing gesture, or feel the sweep of a national crisis. We 
throw ourselves into worship, as we dive into the ocean, 
confident of its well-tested power to lift and refresh 
us, but no longer balancing, sustaining, or directing 
ourselves by step and step as we do on the land of 
ordinary thought and action. 

The answer to prayer is in the forgiveness of sins, 
conditioned by the sincerity of our repentance, and in 
a heightened power of fresh or original vision, which is 
the servant of reform. 



CHAPTER XXXIV 



ALL TOGETHER 



I have sketched four pictures of ''real life," the world 
of healing, refreshment, and strength. I hope they do 
not all look alike. The sharp contrasts, the vivid in- 
dividuality of each should never be merged. For in 
all the range of creation nothing is more vitally inter- 
esting than its differences of mood and tone, of light 
and dark, of right and wrong. In fact, there is nothing 
comparable to the fascination of these contrasts except 
the opposite, — their unity. 

Most people that I meet or read about seem to find 
the contrasts more obvious than their unity. The 
talkative, plastic, sociable people are amazed at the 
silence of the laboratory and the mechanical rigidity 
of the workshop. Serious professors and mill treasur- 
ers look askance at play and art, or revile it as foolish 
frivolity; the clergy, who have been beaten into tolera- 
tion, are wistful and puzzled at the thought of the total 
inefficiency and uselessness of whist, chess, or polar 
exploration. Most of all unreasonable and^ blank seems 
to most moderns the worshiping mystic and his retreat 
from the world. To workers, players, and lovers alike 
this monkish withdrawal from the living interchange of 
society and of nature seems incomprehensible, — at 
best something to be borne with a shrug or a pitying 
smile for its mediaevalism. 



ALL TOGETHER 325 

Thus we are split into camps and cliques which are 
perhaps more dangerous in their smiling or sneering 
toleration than they would be in open warfare. For 
war might bring about a contact close enough for mu- 
tual comprehension — in the end. Toleration may mean 
a lazy acquiescence in contradictions that ought to 
arouse. We may bear the conflict between what I think 
right and what you think wrong so equably, so peace- 
ably, so amiably that we come at last to tolerate a 
similar conflict within our own breasts, — which is dis- 
aster and damnation. When my act says " right" and 
my conscience says " wrong," and I all the while look 
tolerantly down upon the conflict as from some height 
of Olympian calm, — then God have mercy on my 
soul! Even the peaceful toleration of a similar differ- 
ence between my standards and my neighbor's is dan- 
gerous unless it is a truce or a pause in prayer for light. 

It is the same with our camps and cliques. We do 
not march behind fighting banners of play, of love, or 
of worship, as organized labor and organized capital 
march and countermarch behind their standards. We 
sit in little offices, shops, and kitchens, content not 
merely to mind our own business, but mindlessly to 
ignore its kinship with other business. We each keep 
our eyes and our minds at home. The result is that the 
devotees of Work, Play, Love, and Worship are sus- 
picious of each other. They do not touch shoulders 
or act together as a teamA 

I should be sorry to aggravate these puzzles or to 



326 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

sharpen still further these divergences and mutual 
suspicions. For just because Work, Play, Love, and 
Worship diverge so sharply each from each, they must 
have a common root. Things can only differ when they 
differ in something. Races differ in color, habits, morals, 
and cookery because they all possess color, habits, 
morals, and cookery. So it is with the sustaining 
powers by which men live. All varieties spring from 
likeness. Hence it is the task of any one who exploits 
the variety to pounce speedily upon the unity, — if he 
can. What is it, then, to live? 

L/To live is to talk with the world. Work, Play, Love, 
and Worship are four good ways of keeping up the 
conversation. The experiments of the working scien- 
tist or philosopher are the questions which he puts to 
reality. The answers come in the form of reactions, 
results, or readings. The dialogue need not be noisy, 
but it must be active. A science which cannot think 
of a question or get an answer when face to face with 
nature is unproductive. Even a working hypothesis 
must earn its pay by asking more and more insistently 
for the answer called verification. 

In agriculture, mining, or navigation it is still question 
and answer that busy us, — but now in a rougher, 
noisier exchange. We wrestle with the elemental, ex- 
changing blows or benefits, issuing commands and 
watching for signs, like an officer, or more often like 
a private. 



ALL TOGETHER 327 

All the earth plays this game. Strategic moves (like 
chess play) are made by the bacteria as they search out 
our weakest tissue and by the bacteriologist who tries 
to foil their attack. Within a decade Paul Ehlich 
put a question to nature 606 times, each time in slightly 
different language : — "Will you or you or you," he said 
to one newly made chemical compound after another, 
"carry arsenic in lethal dose to my enemy the treponema 
pallidum, without harming on your way any human 
cell?" 

At the 606th attempt he heard an answer that suited 
him better than any nature had given him thus far; 
the great drug salvarsan was christened forthwith. 

The army of science has many men listening for 
answers to the questions asked by each. Sometimes 
the answer to your question is heard after your death 
by a youngster with keener hearing. Sometimes a 
friend (or an enemy) with better gift for language will 
reshape your question, modify your experiment so 
that a clear "yes" or "no" comes back from nature, 
hitherto quite silent. 

But the natural sciences are no more talkative than 
the rest. All good thinking, all faithful research, 
whether in history, philosophy, mathematics, econo- 
mics, or any other branch of knowledge, takes the form 
of question and answer, as it interrogates the material 
which it studies. To sit speechless before nature is 
to drowse; to ask questions that find no answer is to 
fail. Often the tete-d-tdte is hard to maintain. The 



328 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

student runs dry of topics. He hears no answer and 
wonders (like the worshiper) whether any answer is on 
its way. Or he fails (like the uninspired artist) to put 
his desire into definite form. 

This is natural and familiar enough in the labora- 
tory or the studio, as it is at the breakfast-table. But 
table talk is simpler than art or science because the 
great conversations of work and play allow us no grace- 
ful retirement. No genteel silence will do. For all the 
live forces in the world are chattering away. Money 
talks ; music speaks ; the vessel answers your hand upon 
the wheel ; the soil responds or fails to respond to your 
cultivation. To be deaf or dumb is to be entranced, 
stage-struck, or paralyzed. 

Out of this slough, training and the inspiration of 
others' example are the best roads. We must be 
trained for all sorts of intercourse with our world, 
taught to play, to love, or to pray, as well as to work. 
Our shyness in the give-and-take which is life, can be 
trained out of us by hard knocks, our coldness mitigated 
by the radiant warmth of good friends. But we must 
anticipate our dangers and be fore-armed. To all of 
us comes the temptation to be less than alive, to pull 
out of the talk, to stop listening, or to go on using the 
same phrases long after the poor, bored universe has 
ceased to attend. That is a weak game, a brutalizing 
job, a languid affection, a formalistic worship full of 
"vain repetitions such as the heathens use," or "those 
wanton revels in mere perception which are at present 



ALL TOGETHER 329 

the bane of our art, of our literature, of our social 
ideals and of our religion." x 

If it is true that initiative and response are the neces- 
ary framework of all life, then the sociable woman with 
k silent husband may take comfort in the thought that 
perhaps he is as loquacious as any one, but in his own 
vay. Conversation in its ordinary form, she then 
perceives, is but one of the living world's perpetual 
interchanges. There is a similar give-and-take in the 
games her husband enjoys, in the business that seems 
to submerge him, and in the wilderness where he takes 
his solitary vacation. If she and all of us can believe 
that our different roads converge toward one goal, 
we are less lonely each upon his own. 

Of special importance, as I believe, is a reiteration 
of the ancient truth that the solitary worshiper or 
ascetic leaves men and nature behind him because he 
is seeking better company. Of course worship is not al- 
ways solitary, but there are times when the conditions 
for intimacy of appeal and clarity of response which 
man just then needs are not to be had in the parlor, in 
the market, or even in a church. Hence he forsakes the 
world in order to get closer to the World. He is not 
doing something wholly different from his busy, play- 
ful, and sociable brethren. He is in touch with reality 
and with facts. He aims to be as busy as the laborer, 
as creative as the artist, and more ardent than the 
lover. Yet he does not attempt any fusion of these 
1 Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity, vol. II, p. 163. 



330 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

separate activities. He seeks, above all, to orient him- 
self and to get his sailing orders before he goes farther. 
For he is going farther. Unlimited and exclusive wor- 
ship is to him an abomination like unmitigated drudg- 
ery, perpetual diversion, or unremitting domesticity. 

Yet worship is not strictly correlative with work, 
play, and love, for it balances and supports them 
all. Without them worship would have, so far as I see, 
no significance. But each and all of them tends toward 
spiritual fatigue from which worship alone can revive 
us. I will not say that worship is the climax and cul- 
mination of all that is most active in daily life. For God 
can be reached through many channels outside wor- 
ship. But to it man returns from all other activities 
as he comes back to his home, — the common goal and 
starting-point of every fresh endeavor. 

Thus far I have found in all the deeds by which men 
live, one salient feature, — the responsive interplay 
between purpose and fulfillment, between initiative 
and return. But this exchange is not a mere shuttling 
of rigid materials across the world's loom. In all forms 
of vital reciprocity something new emerges. Even the 
shuttle is not a mere shuttle. It helps to create a fab- 
ric. So our shuttling questions, conversations, barter- 
ings, experiments, political actions and reactions, must 
build something if they are to give us new spirit and 
take up our spirit into themselves. Service given and 
knowledge received must be continuous and construe- 



ALL TOGETHER 331 

tive, else they are no better than idleness or sleep. Con- 
versation becomes gossipy and desultory unless talkers 
pursue some quest together. 

Look at the negative side of this idea. A desperate 
consciousness of anguish or of oppression is no life- 
giver, because it is static or revolves in a circle. It 
may be as full of sensation, of passion, of intimacy and 
intensity as the trashiest modern novel or the yellow- 
est modern journalism, and yet contain as little of 
truth or worth. Passion cannot hear. Anguish cannot 
speak. Neither can create, though both are often 
linked, more or less unconsciously, with some greater 
power which makes them take part in creation. Pad- 
erewski strikes the piano with the fire of passion, but 
without its blunders and deafness. If he struck with 
his fist instead of with his fingers we should get the 
fruits of passion pure. 

Is it not true that we rightly desire to abolish from 
the earth whatever lacks creative interchange? I re- 
cently heard a patient declare that not for anything 
would he have been deprived of the experience given 
him by a year's illness, not yet ended. But what we 
would willingly be deprived of, what we strive to banish, 
is the sick man's desperate or fruitless struggle with 
overmastering pain, the immigrant's forlorn, bewil- 
dered wanderings in an ill-managed port of entry, the 
prisoner's soul-numbing walk up and down his cell, 
the child's suffering under punishment which he believes 
unjust or cruel, the fruitless aridity of the desert, the 



332 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

torpor of the tropics, the paralyzing cramp of poverty, 
the exhaustion of industrial overstrain. 

The four essentials which I have been describing 
throughout this book are united, then, by their root. 
They are rooted in one deep fact which seems to be as 
fundamental in the natural as in the spiritual world. 
They all create something new out of an interchange 
which can be called give-and-take, initiative and re- 
sponse, adaptation to environment and by environ- 
ment, or simply conversation. They all sprout sym- 
bols, like leaves, as soon as they grow up, and through 
these they draw their nourishment. This means that 
absolute faithfulness, in work, in play, or in love, brings 
us into contact with God whether we know it or not. 
Whatever we do "for its own sake" looking to no 
ulterior reward, we are treating in fact as a symbol 
of what-is-best-worth-while-in- the- world. Ultimately, 
if we think it through, this means what our forefathers 
meant by God. 

The divinity of work, play, and art is in their abso- 
lute faithfulness, their care for a degree of perfection 
which cannot be recognized, or rewarded by men. The 
same faithfulness expresses much of the religion which 
is love; beyond that, the endless power of forgiveness 
that is in any pure devotion, points to its share in the 
infinite fertility and resource of the divine. To be con- 
scious of the divinity which is directly continuous 
with our own effort whenever we do our best, en- 
hances the effort and the joy in it. But the con tin- 



ALL TOGETHER 333 

uity and the contact are there whether we recognize 
them or not. We cannot get away from God, though 
we can ignore him. When Him we fly, He is the 
wings. 

Because the four heroes of my tale are thus intimately 
related through their common ancestor in man's need, 
it is but natural that they should support and shape 
each other by their difference as well as their likeness. 
They do not fuse or drop their individuality, but play 
into each other, work toward each other, befriend 
one another, and send each to the other's shrine. 

Recall some examples of this interchange. Unsatis- 
fied with the best we can do at our work, we turn (if 
we are wise and healthy) to the lessons to be learned 
from play, — from Franz Kneisel's string quartette, 
for instance. That quartette plays with the dash, the 
precision, the reserve which we want to get into our 
work. The artists in that quartette have carried their 
music through the laborious and painful to the playful 
stage before they let us hear it. After the concert 
they will set to work again upon some new and sterner 
task, in turn to be mastered and transformed to 
something fit to play in public. The working side of 
life seems to belong more*properly in private, where we 
prepare and whet ourselves for play. Every new game 
or art requires work before we can learn it. The shape- 
less silly games which can be mastered without labor 
and cannot be improved by practice, are fit only for 



334 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

the feeble-minded or for the feeble-minded hours near 
to sleep. 

Love, like beauty and play , brightens and strengthens 
us for work. We labor to deserve the miraculous gift. 
We work to prove our devotion, to express our gratitude 
for what is given us, to pass along and fix its inspira- 
tion in permanent form. One suspects the genuineness 
of any affection that does not issue in work. "If ye 
love me," says the vision at the heart of every affec- 
tion, "keep my commandments," carry them out in 
work and in joy. Every strong emotion ought to be 
worked off or worked out somehow, as William James 
and others have told us, — the emotion of love above 
all. " Do you love your country? Well, then, what work 
are you doing for it?" You say that you care for 
poetry. " Did you ever master any or learn it by heart? 
If not, your head, not your heart, is in it." 

When love springs up between people who have not 
known hard work their union lacks something that 
labor would have taught them. Such an affection lacks 
the patience, the long foresight, and tenacious memory 
which work trains, while in the process it knocks some 
of the nonsense out of us. So work teaches us to love. 

On the other hand, love teaches us how and why 
to work. To attach one's self to a task "for better, for 
worse " may seem impossibly quixotic and barren unless 
one is already learning through love in marriage that 
total commitment is a joy which makes all half-hearted 
and temporary contracts look cheap. 



ALL TOGETHER 335 

In the love of those who cannot play one suspects 
no lack of fidelity. Fruitlessness is a more probable fault. 
Play gives us the rest, change, fresh surfaces, new 
lights, and tastes by which to keep our affections fruit- 
ful. Play and the renewing of our minds and bodies by 
beauty, as well as by worship, make our love creative. 
The minor art of humor is especially quickening and 
restorative. Until we can laugh at each other as well as 
with each other, our love is vulnerable. It lacks the 
comradeship and equanimity that even shallow ac- 
quaintances may possess. It is topheavy. 

Work, love, and play make a strong team together. 
They brace and reenforce each other. Yet they all leave 
us rudderless and unsatisfied without prayer. They 
can attain creative power only in worship, which — in- 
choate or full formed — is the source of all originality, 
because it sends us to our origin. (The harder we work 
and play and the more intensely we devote ourselves 
to whomever and whatever we love, the more press- 
ing is our need for reorienting, recommiting, refresh- 
ing ourselves in an appeal to God) 

Yet worship is itself refreshed and supported by 
daily life. One mistrusts the sincerity of all religious 
expression by those whose lives do not furnish a large 
proportion of performance to a relatively small amount 
of prayerful pledge or petition. For religious expression 
is our superlative, and becomes cheap and weak unless 
through stored and gathered efforts we earn our right 



336 WHAT MEN LIVE BY 

to use it. The most religious people are not those who 
talk and write the most about God, but those who best 
prove their love in faithful performance of what they 
believe to be his will. 

Each of the foods by which our spirit lives makes us 
hungry for the rest. We may ignore or misinterpret the 
desire, but unless it is satisfied, we shrivel. Each of the 
four languages in which we may talk with our neighbor, 
the world, falls on deaf ears and fails of response unless it 
is spoken with creativeness, with symbolism, and with 
loyalty to a central motive. Work falls flat, play and 
art become sterile, love and worship become conven- 
tional, unless there is originality, personal creation in 
each. I must do my job in my own way, find an in- 
dividual outlet in the symbols of art or game, and an 
individual answer in love and prayer if I am to feel at 
home in the world. Yet this individual note is no cry 
in the void because it claims brotherhood with all 
future and distant notes. 

By originality and by symbolism, then, the home of 
our spirit is consecrated, but still more truly, perhaps, 
by our free and final allegiance. Our will is needed to 
invest the world with its own divinity. We hoist a flag 
and take possession once for all with a sort of "cosmic 
patriotism," grateful for our escape from chaos and 
the dark. 

THE END 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Addams, Jane, 61, 90, 167. > 
Andersen, Hans Christian, 280. 
Arequipa, 75. 
Arnold, Matthew, 103. 
Arts, 101. 

fine, 107. 

minor, 108, 115. 

popular, 107, in. 

Briggs, Le Baron R., 5. 
Brown, Dr. Philip King, 75. 
Browning, Robert, 195. 
Burgess, Gelett, 60. 
Business, 62. 

Cabot, Ella Lyman, 279, 281. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 55. 

Chastity, 227-30. 

Chesterton, G. K., 52, 119, 201, 

256. 
Children, 93, 97. 
Choice, 206, 222, 244. 
Christ, 184, 207, 302, 308. 
and forgiveness,^i83. 
Christianity, 264. 
Commercialism, 38. 
Communion, 314. 
Comradeship, 167-80. 
Confession, 298. 

Davidson, T., 38. 
Dickinson, Emily, 149. 
Disenthrallment, 282. 
Driscoll, D., 21. 
Drudgery, 4, 6. 

Education, 6, 155, 194. 

medical, 79-80. 
Ehrlich, Paul, 327. 
Elemental, the, 167. 
Eliot, C. W., 21. 

Emerson, R. W., 203, 213, 269, 282, 
309. 

Faith, 7, 202, 234. 
Fatigue, spiritual, 271-73. 
Ferguson, Charles, 50. 



Forgiveness, 256, 316. 
Francis of Assisi, 318. 
Frankness, 223. 
Freud, S., 298. 
Froebel, 98. 

Games, 130-53. 
Genius, 63. 
Give-and-take, 117-29, 326. 

in adventure, 123. 

games, 122, 134. 

love, 232-35. 

oratory, 123. 

religion, 128. 

science, 327. 
God, 332. 

love of, 185. 

service of, 161. 
Goethe, 219. 
Grace, divine, 60, 64. 
Gratitude, 76-78, 311. 
Groos, Karl, 96, 125. 
Growth, 239. 

Halos, 70. 

Hocking, W. E., 271, 273, 274, 315. 

Humor, 151. 

Humor and good-humor, 108. 

Huysmans, 125. 

Idleness, 13. 

Idolatry, 221. 

Impersonality and love, 199, 2 10-18. 

Impersonation, 63, 142-50. 

in love, 145. 

morality, 147. 

play, 142. 

work, 143. 

James, William, 5, 66, 68, 334. 
Jealousy, 179, 221. 
Jewels, 1 12-16. 

Knowledge, 172. 
Kostlin, 126. 

Lamb, Charles, 173. 



340 



INDEX 



Laughter, 233, 335. 

Lee, G. S., 50. 

Lee, Joseph, 96. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 280, 314. 

Literalism, 201. 

Love, allies of, 167-80. 

consecration of, 196. 

creation in, 191. 

impersonal, 199. 

infinite, 181-86. 

integrity in, 219-22. 

loyalty in, 200-09. 

mutuality in, 232-35. 

physical element in, 177, 192, 
217. 

split apart, 193. 

stupidity in, 200. 

symbolism in, 187-99. 

types of, 175-80. 
Loyalty, 65-68. 

to cosmos, 304. 
Luther, Martin, 60. 

Martineau, James, 6. 
Medicine, 169. 
Meredith, George, 70-72. 
Modesty, 222-27. 
Moody, W. V., 191. 
Marriage, 230, 239-64. 

bond, 250. 

choice in, 244. 

exclusiveness of, 242. 

forgiveness in, 255. 

hifalutin, 262-63. 

idolatry in, 261. 

and possession, 247. 

security in, 254. 

understanding in, 259-61. 

vows of, 188. 
Morality, 61, 157. 
Music, 61, 314. 

"Nature," 54. 
Neurasthenia, 75. 

Orientation, 276-78. 
Originality, 62, 319-21. 
Ostwald, W., 62. 

Palmer, G. H., 34, 289. 
Petition, 301. 

Plans and their ripening, 43. 
Play, 5, 87. 

and art, 101, 105. 



and health, 104. 

and rhythm, no, 130. 

by-products of, 154. 

chaotic, 138. 

consecration of, 160, 164. 
destructive, 137. 

good and bad, 140. 

trance in, 130-35. 
Praise, 309. 

from nature, 313. 
Prayer, 267-336. 

answer to, 316-23. 

beauty and, 287. 

and communion, 314. 

conditional element in, 302. 

disenthrallment in, 282. 

Du Maurier on, 268. 

Emerson on, 269, 282. 

and fatigue, 271. 

fulfilment in, 274. 

forgetfulness and, 279. 

and forgiveness, 317. 

and gratitude, 311. 

W. E. Hocking on, 271, 273, 
274. 

hunger for, 267. 

joy and, 289. 

justification of, 315. 

orientation in, 276-78. 

originality from, 319-21. 

and praise, 309. 

and repentance, 318. 

solitude and, 293. 3 

sorrow and, 287. 

and truth-seeking, 305. 

unfashionable, 268. 

wonder in, 284. 

Recognition, art of, 118. 
Recollection, 279. 
Repentance and prayer, 318. 
Romance, 236-38. 
Royce, Josiah, 329. 

Sacrament, 198. 
Sacrifice in art, 245. 
Satiety, 257. 
Schaufner, R. H., 126. 
Science, 62, 67. 
Secularity, 196. 
Self-government, 161. 
Sentimentalism, 216. 
Seriousness, 89-97. 
Service, 78. 






INDEX 



34i 



Shakespeare, William, 204. 

Shaw, G. B., 90, 167, 197, 236, 239. 

Socialism, 26. 

Solitude and prayer, 293. 

Sport, good, 156. 

Stevenson, R. L., 171, 200. 

Success, 81. 

Suggestion, psychotherapeutic, 204. 

Swedenborg, E., 214. 

Symbolism, 142, 161. 

in affection, 187-99. 

good and bad, 189. 

physical, 190. 

Tschaikowsky, Peter I., 61. 
Theotropism, 290, 295. 
Thompson, Francis, 180. 
Tolstoy, L., 14, 44, 45, 69, 171. 

Unconsciousness, 19. 

Victory, 155. 

Wagner, Richard, 171. 
War, moral equivalents, 5. 
Wolcott, Roger, 94. 
Wonder and prayer, 284. 



Work, 4-87. 

and the amateur, 23. 

and anarchy, 66. 

and its boss, 31. 

and its companionship, 36. 

and courage, 17. 

and thecrude, 28, 40, 44, 50, 58. 

defined, 4, 99. 

and discouragement, 15. 

and habit, 11. 

joy of, 21. 

and loyalty, 65. 

manual and mental, 41-49. 

monotony of, 29, 32. 

motive for, 8-10. 

and its product, 32. 

psychical standards of, 27, 37. 

and its radiations, 59-64. 

and religion, 84-85. 

and its reward, 73-85. 

and specialism, 34. 

and talk, 52. 

and our title, 34. 

and usefulness, 74-79. 
Worry, 18. 
Worship, 267-336. 

(See also Prayer.) 



Otfte $itor£ibe $tt& 

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



BOOKS BY RICHARD C. CABOT, M.D. 

The Christian Approach to Social Morality 

National Board of Young Women's Christian Associations, 1913, 
600 Lexington Ave., New York City 

Differential Diagnosis 

W. B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia. Two editions, 191 1, 
1912 

Social Service and the Art of Healing 

Moffat, Yard & Co., New York, 1909 , 

Psychotherapy and its Relation to Religion 

Moffat, Yard & Co., New York, 1908 

Case Teaching in Medicine 

W. M. Leonard, Boston. Two editions, 1906-1912 

Physical Diagnosis 

William Wood & Co., New York. Five editions, 1901-1912 

Serum Diagnosis of Disease 

William Wood & Co., New York, 1899 

Clinical Examination of the Blood 

William Wood & Co., New York. Five editions, 1896-1904 



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